A change is coming to how European healthcare professionals want to engage with medical content.
Medical journals and other printed publications have long had an important place in the lives of European physicians. Professional digital platforms such as Medscape or Doctors.net.uk in the UK have continued to grow in prominence in the lives of European doctors, especially as print journals increasingly turned into digital only editions. And, more recently numerous medical apps have gained traction with healthcare professionals, such as ONCOassist or Tonic App across Spain, Italy and Portugal.
But recent European physician research conducted by CMI Media Group in partnership with Medscape unearthed another channel that is becoming more and more valuable to European physicians - and especially so among younger physicians. That channel is video.
The research, which was focused on learning more about the professional media habits of healthcare professionals across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, asked a number of questions about how the physicians liked to engage with video content.
One question asked the European physicians to judge how important different sources of information were for staying up to date with the latest professional information. Seventy-five percent of healthcare professionals said that medically relevant videos were either very or extremely important to their work.
That number was higher than the importance given to social media, online physician communities and even medical reps from pharmaceutical companies. However, when we looked at the ages of the respondents, a clear trend started to emerge.
Almost 85% of physicians who were aged between 28 and 38 agreed that video content was either very or extremely important to them. Among the next age group up, 39 to 48, that figure was 80%. As the age group increased, the importance they placed on video content slowly decreased. It became apparent that younger physicians were enjoying, and relying on video content much more than their older peers were doing.
Another question the research asked the European physicians was about how frequently they were actually watching medically relevant videos. As an entire group, just over 55% said they watched medical video content at least once a week. But again, when looking at the 28 to 38 year old range, that number jumped to 80%. And almost 20% said they viewed such content daily. Again, the overall percentage of European physicians who said they were looking at medical content at least weekly, decreased as the audience grew older.
This, plus other information in the research, showed a clear trend. Video content is a much more important source of information to younger physicians. We expect the channel’s importance to only increase as younger generations of physicians start to join the European workforce.
All of this points towards European pharmaceutical marketers and brand teams needing to put an increased level of focus and resources on creating video-oriented marketing strategies for healthcare professionals in their markets.
Of course, across Europe, consumer platforms such as YouTube are off-limits for branded, prescription medicine promotion. And though social networks can be a great platform for distributing video content, we must also be careful about the type of content that can be shared on public-facing websites. While they could be used for disease awareness videos from a key opinion leader, for example, they also cannot be used for anything that could be described as promotional prescription drug content.
There are however, a growing number of video-oriented opportunities open to brand teams who want to include video marketing in their omnichannel strategies. Platforms such as Medscape have rolled out native video opportunities across Europe that can be targeted contextually at healthcare professionals in a compliant manner. Other similar platforms also now offer opportunities to position any video content they may have in front of healthcare professionals. Most websites will also accept digital display banners with video embedded in them.
There are more and more video opportunities for pharma marketers becoming available in Europe all of the time. As new doctors enter the workforce across the continent, it is imperative that brand teams in pharmaceutical companies take note of this shift pushed forward by younger generations of doctors towards video content being a preferred source of medical information.
If brand teams fail to embrace the channel and its possibilities, they run the risk of alienating a growing portion of their audience, or even missing opportunities to engage with them entirely. Video content will soon be one of the most important channels for reaching physicians, across Europe.
Authored by: Matthew Durham. Director, Global Media, CMI Media Group
As Director of Global Media, Matt’s focus is on leading the agency’s expansion internationally. His passion is in international healthcare media strategy and planning, across the global, regional, and single-country levels. Matt has more than decade of experience working in the OUS pharmaceutical media industry. He is based in London.