Michael Jordan, Ryan Reynolds, Mark Zuckerberg, Liz Moench …GOATs (or “greatest of all time” for those unfamiliar with the term).
Greats play better than others. GOATs change the game.
You know MJ. Great ball player. No, GREAT ball player. His game-changer: licensing his likeness as an icon and his name as a franchise. GOATs create new paths and then run down them. Sure, winning matters. But he knew franchises matter more. Maybe that’s why he plonked down $275 million to buy a really bad NBA team. For most of his 13 years owning the Hornets, they got worse. Last month, he sold his stake for $2.7 billion. TV pays to license franchises because that’s all we watch. MJ’s Spidey sense told him that.
You’ve seen Reynolds’ movies. Good actor. GOAT brander. Aviator Gin, Mint Mobile, Wrexham Association Football Club. He didn’t just infuse his celebrity, he became the product. I mean why rent your name for hundreds of millions, when you can own the product and make billions?
You use Zuck’s apps—Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. With 10 million… 100M… 130M… 150M people, you likely know someone on Threads, the fastest growing app—ever. Faster than ChatGPT. Meta knew it was easy to clone Twitter and everyone knew everyone wanted a new text app. No one else scaled it. Zuck brought his 2B+ customers to his new app. Copy. Right. Game. Changed.
So… who’s Liz Moench? She put the first pharma ad on TV. Not just the idea for it—the “do” of it. Last year, we saw $8B of those ads. Forty-two years and a gadrillion dollars later, it’s safe to say that the game is changed. Others may have thought about it; she did it. GOAT.
The best time to change the game is when the world is changing. Right now, all media is changing with new channels, greater influencer influence, and automated, scalable intelligence, which means that pharma’s digital world is in flux. It’s GOAT time!
Since GOATs can make the future, I turned to several within our industry and asked them:
“What will work… NEXT?”
Jasper Beard, Senior Director of Portfolio Marketing, ViiV Healthcare, previously won a PM360 Trailblazer Brand Champion Award. He says that, today, AI is a trailblazer in digital marketing. It can analyze data, derive insights, and personalize customer experiences. It’s easy to get addicted to the instant gratification of tactics and execution. Like a robot Allen Iverson watching himself make shot after shot. The hard part is staying focused on the long term—the strategy. Jasper says, “The game-changing part is using human decision-making, empathy, and perspective to know when and how to employ trailblazing tools—something that AI cannot do. Savvy marketers create value for brands when they focus on strategy and understand precisely when to employ AI and other tools.”
Shana Washington is Director, Global Marketing – COVID at Moderna. Shana’s long game is the short game. She found a way for HCP experts to voice highlights about COVID’s biggest topics for a global clinical audience. As Shana said, “People place video ads in text-based stories. Audio is far more compelling than text and can be used in more places. Being around great voices gives us a way to tell Moderna’s story all the time. Even when people are off screen.”
Danny Weisman is Global Media Director at Noble People. He has more big ideas in a day than I have cups of coffee. His brill posts on LinkedIn influence my thinking. It’s only right that he weighs in on influence. Have you ever been to one of those really fancy restaurants? The ones that serve “deconstructed” desserts. All the banana cream pie ingredients are there. They’re just arranged differently. Some crust over here. A banana over there. Media is like that now—deconstructed. MrBeast used modern media and hacking algorithms to become a superstar. He did what publishers like Buzzfeed or Vice tried to do—become a beloved brand in digital media. Danny’s futuristic ponderance, “We’ll see if it [influence] can be a sustainable business.”
Frank X. Powers. Yes, FXP. Co-founder and Managing Partner at Elevate. He reminds us that things change. Fundamentals don’t. Amidst the proliferation of AI-driven tools and emerging marketing channels, the human touch (and voice) remains paramount in healthcare marketing. “The true greats always come back to the fundamentals, and in a time of flux, brand strategy provides all marketers with a North Star. Brands change the game when they deliver on a carefully crafted strategy. Cultivate a human-centric approach. Focus on building trust and strong relationships with HCP and their patients. A finely constructed brand strategy will always work, regardless of era.” – FXP.
Neil Ravenhill, PhD, develops HCP training programs for neurologists and physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) specialists for Ipsen’s neuroscience franchise. “There’s always a new, ‘new.’ The challenge is deciding which type of new to embrace. Some advances (such as AI) move at such a pace that the iteration or tool chosen could easily be redundant tomorrow.”
Dr. Ravenhill picks innovations that feel more like “channels;” things that will continue to work well whatever changes around them. “Voice, for example, has a fundamental simplicity and deep emotional connectivity to verbal knowledge transfer and will likely continue to develop as an anchor point leveraged by other technologies.” Dr. Ravenhill’s prescription is: “We are at one of those magical moments-in-time that many people across our industry will look back on in three to five years and wish they had engaged and embraced the ‘new’ properly; I recommend picking your ‘new’ carefully!”
In 2022, Carlos Alcaraz became the youngest man to win a major tennis tournament. The day after he won Wimbledon this year, Nike was quick to run a new ad. The copy: “Don’t belong to an era. Start your own. Just Do It.” He’s a future GOAT.
Media is moving pretty fast. If we don’t stop and ask around once in a while, the game will change and we will be left in the last era.
#SpideySense.
#InfuseYourHumanity.
#CopyRight.
#JustDoIt.
