The Differential | #10
David McCarthy
I can’t say I thought I’d publish ten editions when this first began, but here we are. It’s been a fun, educational side project that’s connected me to some super-bright people. Thanks for reading, for the kind words you shared on the way, and for your tolerating typos that arose while I wrote these newsletters way too late at night.
In this 🥳 tenth edition:
B2B healthcare and health tech marketing, in the feed. A Gandalf-bearded Jay-Z producer and AI-scribe brand collaborate. Evernorth counters claims about its PBM business, kind of. The navigator space is at a crossroads, says one leader.
And now, some data. Click-through rates for SEO and Drake’s reputation can share a Venn diagram.
The differential. If campaigns are “dead,” then what do we do with the campaign brief?
Makers. Rik Renard, of CareOps and Sword Health, deserves an EGOT.
Prompts on prompts on prompts. Four collections of prompts to help us stave off career extinction and work a bit more easily than we do now.
But first - a PSA for the next ten editions
Ten editions in, is this newsletter helpful? What can make it more useful?
B2B healthcare marketing, in the feed
There’s no other way to start this edition: Rik Rubin and Abridge. I can’t add much more. Read more
Abridge goes Hollywood. The brand also released one of the most unexpectedly dramatic ViVE-hype videos I’ve seen. (If their funding continues, I can’t envision not including examples of their marketing investments in every edition.) See the video
Fresh off its announcement to acquire Accolade, Transcarent kicked off Voyages, its event to “inspire benefits leaders to claim their power and drive meaningful healthcare change.” The speaker lineup blended leaders from pharma, employers, and more. I’m not an event marketer, nor should I be, but I’m envious of brands that create their own events (Lyra and League invest big in this, too). That said, “Voyages” has a vibe I did not anticipate from a brand like Transcarent. Learn more
Co-founder and CEO of Included Health, Owen Tripp, penned a LinkedIn article in early January, arguing that “healthcare navigation has lost its way.” The timing of the article is curious, with Accolade being acquired the same day. In his article, Tripp argues that the navigation category has stalled and never delivered on “its promise to be an unbiased guide.” Read more
Following the topic of navigators and advocates, Evernorth launched a large repositioning campaign for its PBM business, arguing that their PBM, ExpressScripts, is “not a middleman, but rather an advocate.” Display ads appeared on the New York Times and more. Unfortunately, they kept an article on their website that calls their PBM business a middleman. Read more
Citiblock published its annual report on providing care for dually eligible beneficiaries. Reports like these are monumental feats, especially for small marketing teams within growing companies. I often assume senior leaders expect these reports to be marketing flagships for the year, and I have doubts about whether they can be. That said, this kind of asset has grown on me, perhaps because it conveniently collects in one place much of the information I would have had to scour the internet for. Read more
Trilliant Health makes me jealous. The company markets analytics, research, and strategic expertise. They also offer an enviable blueprint for how to “productize” a brand’s expertise into top-funnel content and even monetize it. See an example
Conduce Health, which “predicts patient needs, enables personalized specialty care, and optimizes networks,” refreshed its brand identity and its website. See the new look
And now, some data on Marketing
why seo and drake can share a venn diagram
In late January, many marketers’ LinkedIn feeds went as bonkers as they can get on the platform.
The director of content marketing at Ahrefs shared a screenshot of a graph showing HubSpot’s organic blog traffic. I’ve not seen a screenshot gain so much traction and inspire so many copycat posts (or responses) as this did. But I’m not surprised why.
The brand’s traffic — once a proofpoint for marketers’ pleas to invest in organic content — dropped as drastically as Drake’s reputation after the Super Bowl.
The emergence of ChatGPT and other gen AI products spurred many predictions about the demise of SEO as a distribution channel. The widespread adoption of AI and Google’s pivot to “zero click” results seem to have made that not just a prediction but a reality for many brands. (Gartner forecasts a 25% drop. That seems conservative.)
SEER Interactive, a digital agency that specializes in SEO, confirmed as much. According to their research, SEO and PPC CTRs are at “an all time low,” as shown in the chart below.
Declarations of “the death of SEO” are prevalent on X, LinkedIn, and probably some teams’ Slacks. I don’t buy that we’re there yet, but the channel’s value — and the strategy to reap it — is clearly changing.
The Differential
“Campaigns are dead,” they say. So what about campaign briefs?
A former CMO of Salesforce declared at a conference a couple of years ago that campaigns are dead. (I couldn’t find the AdAge article that the quote appeared in.) Coming from an executive at that particular company at an event sure to garner press, the proclamation may have been self-serving.
But the quote also contained some truth: marketing and content are limitless now. Buyers can explore brands and products endlessly (if not exhaustingly). We marketers are, in turn, more like streamers than showrunners — we create, we syndicate, and we “license.”
If campaigns are meaningless now (personally, I think they still hold value when used more precisely and oriented to conversion), the campaign brief may be dead, too, or at the very least must adapt. Traditional artifacts like an editorial calendar can somewhat help fill that gap and organize some of that always-on marketing, especially in branded channels.
But as the number of channels and creators multiply, can these artifacts really keep up as is?
A blueprint may come from, of all places, a legacy motorcycle brand. A decade or so ago, Harley-Davidson supplied brand zealots with brand assets they could customize and then share in communities like Facebook. The next adaptation of the brief can take the same “bottom-up” approach — supply all the marketers, creators, and ambassadors within a company the assets, the messaging and point of view, the CTAs, and the data that they need to bring to market during a longer timeframe.
The brief can still be valuable, but its scope (its X and Y axis) needs to evolve. And rather than dictate and focus only on a discrete set of approved brand-centric activities within a campaign, it may need to adapt to today’s polycreator landscape. After all, many channels now seem to favor individuals’ content instead of brands’ (c.f., the reach of LinkedIn’s company pages versus individuals’, and the inclusion of forums in organic search results).
PS - I’m working on a template for this kind of brief. Holler if it would interest you.
Makers: Rik Renard, CareOps and Sword Health
What can’t Rik Renard do?
The co-founder of CareOps, a community and a movement to improve care-delivery operations, and a product lead at Sword Health, Rik seems to defy the usual limits that creators have historically set for themselves in one particular way: I’m not sure he has any.
👉 Have an official or unofficial creator in our space that you love? Let me know.
Prompts on Prompts on Prompts
If you haven’t heard the catastrophic proclamations, generative AI is taking over the world and may unemploy all of us in a matter of weeks if we don’t adapt (unless, apparently, we thwart its progress by including curse words in search queries).
To that end, I’ve begun collecting prompts to explore and adopt for my workflows. Maybe they’re helpful for yours too.
Orbit Media Studio CMO Andy Crestodina outlined three ways to use AI to compare your brand’s performance versus competitors. Read more
A CRO lead for direct-to-consumer brands provided a rough workflow for integrating insights from a useful piece of content into your project workflow. Read more
Multiple founder and CMO Kat Wendelstadt shared how she uses AI to help her create presentations more quickly. Read more
HubSpot published more than 1,000 AI and automation use cases and examples. Read more
I post on LinkedIn, too
A brief disclaimer
I reference and link to many healthcare brands in the newsletter. Including them does not signify an endorsement of their business.