Cannes Lions is set up to celebrate the best campaigns around the globe, but this year the focus from healthcare agencies was squarely on the need for greater equality, diversity and inclusion.
Taking center stage at Cannes to talk about those issues—and how they directly affect patients—was Claire Gillis, CEO of VMLY&R Health, and the agency’s chief experience design officer, Walter Geer, who were joined on stage by Tianna Bartoletta, a two-time Olympian with three gold medals across track and field.
The patient experience has never been so important to healthcare marketing as it is now, Geer said, and VMLY&R Health—which won two Cannes Lions for its work in pharma along with health and wellness this year—is working to understand how to better match up its campaigns to that need.
“It’s about understanding that consumer journey,” Geer said at Cannes Lions in June. “When you’re talking about that journey, it’s about knowing these individuals. What are the things they do? Where are the places they like to go? What do they like to eat? And so on.
“When you add health to the journey, you start to add a new layer on top of that for their health journey," he said.
Take cancer and how a cancer patient’s day can change drastically depending on their treatment, their mood and how their disease is affecting them, Geer said. This effect can be most severe when a patient is first diagnosed, but that doesn’t mean it ends there.
If you take a breast cancer patient who has beaten the disease, that’s not the end of it, Geer said. Most women will then be given a long-term drug, tamoxifen. The day to day changes, but then in five years, when the patient comes off tamoxifen, that can have another drastic effect and lead to feelings of insecurity, given that tamoxifen is used to help prevent the cancer returning.
“So, it’s how we reach patients in those moments—the moments that actually matter—but figuring out what are the best ways and technology to actually get to them," Geer said.
While tech can be a tool to help, it can also cause harm, he argued. “So, take [artificial intelligence] for instance. The people who build AI don’t necessarily look like me [a young African American], right? And when they don’t look like me, they’re not going to speak with me in an effective way.”
To understand how an agency speaks “as a brand,” the team behind it has to know how to speak to individuals, rather than at them. “That starts with having diversity in those positions and diverse individuals that are actually doing the work,” he said.
As a Black woman, Bartoletta is also fighting to remove the bias in healthcare she says many Americans, and especially Black Americans, face every day. And that includes Bartoletta herself, who has a seven-month-old child and faced bias just by giving birth.
In new research published last year, yielded from death certificates from 2016 and 2017, researchers writing in the AJPH found that the maternal mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black women was 3.5 times that of non-Hispanic white women.
In a powerful speech, Bartoletta said, “When I went into hospital, rather than me have this cute hospital bag, I had my will in an envelope, because I wasn’t sure that I would leave that hospital alive, or with my baby. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.”