Healthcare marketing is back in the Effies. Now let’s make it count.
By Stuart Black, CEO, Ward Marketing Group
It’s taken a while, but Healthcare Marketing has a dedicated category once again at the Australian Effie Awards.
For the uninitiated, the ‘Effies’ are run by Advertising Council Australia. The awards assess marketing campaigns across numerous categories and are judged by senior industry leaders, marketers, and researchers.
Tonight, the Australian advertising industry will gather in Sydney to celebrate the campaigns that have delivered demonstrable results.
It’s a welcome return. Healthcare marketing has a strong history of competing alongside Australia’s most effective campaigns, with work recognised across a range of Effie categories over the years. The return of a dedicated Health Marketing category provides another opportunity to showcase the quality of our thinking and what we produce and the particular challenges of marketing in healthcare.
And those challenges are considerable. We work in an environment where scientific evidence matters, regulation shapes what we can say, and the decisions we’re trying to influence can have profound consequences for people’s lives.
We’re often asking people to change entrenched behaviours, confront uncomfortable health realities, seek treatment or make complex decisions about their care. Doing that effectively requires exceptional creativity, a sophisticated understanding of human behaviour and a relentless focus on outcomes.
And increasingly, it requires proof of effectiveness that, for many campaigns, can’t be measured through sales data alone.
The return of a dedicated Health Marketing category acknowledges the maturity of our discipline and the contribution it makes. But having the category back is only the beginning.
We now have an opportunity to build a stronger evidence base around the outcomes our campaigns deliver, and to demonstrate the breadth of effectiveness across Australia’s healthcare marketing sector.
That means moving beyond reach, impressions and engagement to examine what actually changes as a result of our work. Did we change behaviour? Improve understanding? Help people make better-informed decisions? Deliver measurable commercial results? Did we save or extend lives?
These are the questions that should define effectiveness in our industry.
I’m particularly proud that Ward6, alongside our client Organon, is a finalist in this year’s Health Marketing category, recognised for our Maxalt Migraine Relief campaign.
There is exceptional healthcare marketing being delivered across Australia, and we should be encouraging more healthcare companies and their agency partners to invest in measuring outcomes, not just outputs, and to demonstrate the impact of what they do and put their work forward for scrutiny.
Because the stronger the evidence of what healthcare marketing achieves, the stronger the case for investing in it. And the greater the investment in genuinely effective healthcare marketing, the greater the opportunity to improve health outcomes.
Regardless of whether we take home an Effie tomorrow night, the real winners from the return of this category should be healthcare companies, healthcare professionals and, most importantly, patients.
And that’s something worth celebrating.
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