Charles Benaiah
Chief Executive Officer
watzan
Personalizing Medical Content
Everyone creates content. One person strives above all to make it relevant: Charles Benaiah. For the past decade, Charles has developed solutions that make it easier for people to get the content they want without having to wade through an overabundance of information.
Charles began his quest for content relevancy when he started Sequence, the first personal media company. Sequence registered and cataloged the clinical interests of nearly 400,000 physicians. They used that knowledge to create and deliver millions of personal publications—providing physicians with the articles they wanted to read.
But even after selling Sequence to R.R. Donnelley in 2011, Charles still wasn’t done innovating and delivering personalized content. He returned to healthcare in 2014 with watzan, which improved on Sequence, as he explains, “Sequence was black and white. If you like the topic, we sent you the article. If you didn’t want it, we left it out. watzan is Sequence with shades of grey.”
The company’s offering, called zen, makes it easier for conference participants to discover the content and people they want to seek out while attending. The program augments the images associated with conference’s content to convey relevancy, so the more the person likes the content, the bigger the image. The more the person’s colleagues care about it, the brighter it is. Instead of choosing content for the user, zen provides the info to help the user make better decisions.
watzan debuted zen at Interscience Conference of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in September 2014 to rave reviews. Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Ian Pereira said, “zen overcomes the navigational nightmare.”
But the offering is also a boon for marketers by offering something different—personality marketing. Later this year, watzan will introduce z2, which turns a brand’s assets into a personal experience based on social discovery. That’s done through watzan’s ability to incorporate each clinician’s interests into the storytelling—elevating the experience for each user. Pharma is already excited for the possibilities. The entire ViiV HIV franchise plans to use zen across all infectious disease meetings in 2015 and Shire plans to do the same for its ADHD products.
