When Allison managing director of health Paddi Hurley is putting together a plan for a health client, the first thing she wants to understand is "what is the landscape within which they're operating?"

For example, if a client is first to market "you can do a really robust unbranded education program," whereas "if they're coming into a very crowded market, you likely need to do more branded programming."

Sometimes, however, a combination of the two can work. "The way it normally works is before a drug, for example, is approved, you do something called market conditioning where you're creating awareness around either a condition, the symptoms of a condition, how to get diagnosed, what to talk to your doctor about. And then once the drug is approved, then typically you might move to a more branded program. Especially if it's a competitive market like I was describing before."

The conversation also focuses on how to adequately addreess multicultural audiences. "A condition might be over-indexing among a certain demographic or population—African Americans, for example, or Latinx. So, creating programming that is authentic and bespoke to those audiences is critical."

To create authentic programming, Hurley says, finding the right spokespeople is essential. "You should take your time with to ensure you're finding the right spokesperson. And it's really critical because if you do find the right person, a program not only will take off, but that person could potentially be used across other disciplines, whether it's advertising, going to sales launch meetings to participating in all kinds of marketing initiatives."

And, not surprisingly in today's world, AI has a role to play. "Right now, artificial intelligence is being investigated and employed in multiple clinical trials to help with the FDA requirement to make sure that these clinical trials are better representing the diverse population in the United States."

Measurement also plays a key role, Hurley says. "Measurement is critical and it's constantly evolving in communications and marketing. So, what we like to do at the beginning of a program with a client is understand their KPIs, and their key performance indicators. These can be business objectives. These can be business goals. And then determining how we can demonstrate how we help achieve those, something I personally use a lot is a lot of my clients have annual, ATU surveys. So that's awareness trial usage. And we take that information. And that's ultimately our goal is to improve, improve awareness, improve trial, improve usage."

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