Health-Care Advertisers Find A Way; Mary Meeker's Latest Internet Trends Report Is Out

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The Doctor Is In

A health-care marketing startup that offers in-hospital media solutions – TV screens and tablets that stream educational clips and medical info (and, uh, ads) – is raising $600 million at a multibillion-dollar valuation. Outcome Health, the Chicago-based startup, acquired direct competitor AccentHealth last year for $40 million and serves ads based on which diagnoses are common at a clinic or office. Doctors and hospitals don’t receive money or pay for the service, which also provides Wi-Fi, but they can advertise for free on the screens and can create custom content to show patients, reports The Wall Street Journal. Health-care advertisers have increasingly turned to location targeting and other strategies that don’t target an individual (a privacy no-no) but still get their messages seen.

Hold The Phone

Mary Meeker presented her annual Internet Trends report at Recode’s Code conference. Read the 355-slide presentation. Among the nuggets: Global smartphone penetration is slowing, with year-over-year (YoY) shipment growth down from 10% to 3% and installations down from 25% to 12%. But that hasn’t stopped mobile advertising, which went from 20% YoY growth last year to 22% in this report. Meeker says mobile accounted for $37 billion of the $73 billion online advertising market this year. Global internet usage was flat at 10% with the average consumer spending more than three hours per day on mobile. On the media consumption front, consumers are moving toward digital, streamable experiences on both video and audio, as they cut the cord from traditional pay packages. Netflix’s subscriber base alone has grown 669% over the past five years to 95 million, and the average time consumers spend daily with digital media has doubled from 2:17 hours per day to 4:14 hours per day.

Storm Clouds

Cloud computing opens possibilities for business … and for fraudsters. Agencies and ad vendors have vetted fraud by making their media buys contingent on human engagement, like filling out forms, offering credit cards, clicking links or responding to page prompts. “Unfortunately, cloud computing makes it easier for fraudsters to develop more accounts and spoof human behavior,” writes eZanga CEO Rich Kahn. “That means advertisers can’t be content to focus on conversions; they need to go the extra mile and make sure that the suspicious traffic that led to a sale didn’t result in a chargeback a month later.” More at SmartBrief.

Big Fish, New Pond

In the latest episode of consultancies acquiring agencies, PricewaterhouseCoopers Digital Services bought the design arm of Pond, a Stockholm-based agency, for an undisclosed sum. Pond has built creative campaigns for Jameson and Volkswagen. Holding company CEOs claim that consultancies aren’t a threat because they don’t show up on new business pitches. But PwC global digital leader Tom Puthiyamadam says pitches are outdated. “He’s solving yesterday’s problem on driving more leads, through better campaigns and better creative,” Puthiyamadam said of WPP’s CEO, Sir Martin Sorrell. “Meanwhile, the CEO, his reaction is: ‘I want to take down my marketing spend, not increase it’.” More at The Drum.

Ignorance Is Bliss

CPG companies often spend more to place their products on the right shelves and next to branded cardboard cutouts at a single retailer than on all digital marketing put together. Except those cardboard cutouts only end up on the floor half the time, and then can be obscured or disregarded, reports Jack Neff at Ad Age. And who cares? For legacy channels, including in-store shopper marketing, linear TV or OOH billboards, lack of measurement and oversight has counterintuitively proven a valuable way to maintain trust. More.

But Wait, There’s More!