This piece is the first in a series on targeted health care marketing. In the coming weeks, we’ll bring you a few stories from people in the trenches throughout the industry.
Health data and race are sensitive topics on their own. Put them together, and it’s easy to see why people struggle to thoughtfully tailor their marketing efforts to different audiences.
Still, many health care marketers are opting in to race-based targeting to stay relevant and reach underserved populations.
Effectively speaking to consumers of different backgrounds and connecting them to the care they need necessitates an in-depth knowledge of who they are.
“You have to proceed with a degree of specificity about who you’re trying to speak to at all times,” said Albert Thompson, managing director of digital at full-service advertising agency Walter Isaacson. “Nowhere is the need for segmentation more paramount than in health care because the stakes are so high.”
When developing ad creative and a media plan for an ad campaign, there is some consensus that health care marketers should consider a wide range of traits. Based on conversations with several industry experts, to target different audience segments, advertisers should look beyond consumers’ medical-condition prevalence to characteristics such as language and communication-style preferences, experiences, values, traditions and expectations surrounding health care.
Arguably, getting suitable health care products in front of the right audiences can be a matter of life and death.
“Health care companies sit on a trove of data, so they should be wired to excel,” Thompson said. But “there’s underachievement in the overall practice of speaking to different segments [of the population] in a vertical that is probably the most critical for longevity and survival.”
Legally speaking
Of course, speaking to specific segments of the population about health care can be challenging. And many social media platforms already don’t allow advertisers to start an ad with “Have [Insert Medical Condition]?”
As an advertiser, implying or insinuating knowledge about a consumer’s health is a no-go, said Kristi VandenBosch, US president of Oliver, an in-housing specialist agency. The agency considers any health condition to have a “100% privacy-protected status.” For instance, assuming someone has a condition without them volunteering that information could become a liability for a brand.
Targeted health care marketing can be fraught because some patient data is protected by HIPAA laws. And HIPAA violations – in addition to scrutiny and censure from the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice – can rain down on bad actors that share private consumer health data with third parties.
Targeting consumers based on a protected characteristic, such as race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, can also get dicey from a legal perspective. Though no US federal law or regulation exists about race-based targeted advertising, ads can violate anti-discrimination laws, something Meta has learned the hard way. The social media juggernaut previously changed its ad platform in 2019 in response to lawsuits alleging discrimination in its ad targeting tools and, in 2021, decided to stop targeting ads based on users’ interactions with content on potentially incendiary topics such as health, race, political beliefs and religion.
But not breaking laws (and/or ending up in boiling hot water in the public eye) is the floor. Health care marketers who want to ensure fair, equitable representation and nuanced, accurate targeting of underrepresented populations can hold themselves to a higher standard.
Historical distrust
For people of color, resistance to anything the health care industry is selling is often more deeply rooted than not seeing themselves reflected in ads.
The US has a long history of medical testing and treatment without informed consent. “Black Americans know about the testing that went on in the civil rights era and prior to that, post-slavery. We were guinea pigs, lab rats,” Thompson said.
But the result of this generational mistrust leads to poor health and not properly utilizing the health care system, said Mariza Hardin, co-founder and head of strategy and operation of Zócalo Health, a virtual health care startup that serves Latinx patients in California and Texas.
Many people across racial and ethnic lines in the US may avoid interacting with the health care system because of worries about their immigration status (or that of a loved one) being discovered.
In Hardin’s grandparents’ day, “they didn’t trust that they could sign up for services or benefit programs or even visit a physician’s office without providing information that may get them deported,” she said, which still rings true today.
Marketers can still gain consumers’ trust through their ad creative, though. Culturally responsive ads with an authentic feel – incorporating relatable people, storylines and cultural references – may alleviate (understandable) uncertainty, animosity or fear. If consumers feel understood and welcomed, they’re more likely to visualize themselves using the products and services – and to seek them out.
Social media, for instance, presents opportunities to listen to and engage with underserved consumers and get a sense of what influencers in these spaces are saying and doing. Close to 90% of Americans look for health information on social media, according to “Consumer Informatics and Digital Health.”
“It’s going to take a very focused, intense approach to building trust first, and then driving scale and utilization,” Hardin said. “It’s going to happen with companies that are mission driven, by people who’ve had that experience and understand what these patients are encountering daily when they try to access the existing health care system.”
Representation matters
Another commonly encountered obstacle to effective health care targeting is a familiar refrain across ad land: a lack of diverse representation on marketing teams, which leads to a lack of representation in creative.
The advertising and marketing industry is 7.2% Black, 10.2% Asian and 10.9% Hispanic/Latinx, according to a November 2022 report from the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing. Though the numbers on diverse representation in advertising have steadily improved, the leaders and decision-makers are still predominantly white.
The same applies to health care.
“[People of color] may work there, but the revenue return model didn’t require multicultural consumers to thrive,” Thompson said. “There’s a cultural disconnect in health care enterprises between who’s running them and making decisions and budgeting versus who they have to serve.”
As US consumers become increasingly diverse, marketers recognize they need to have their desired target audience in the room helping make creative decisions. If those organizations lack diversity, the ads they produce can underrepresent or misrepresent minority populations.
Conversely, better representation of marginalized voices in health care advertising can help the industry target underserved consumers with ever greater accuracy and empathy.
“We [marketers] have to be open to constant scrutiny,” said Andy Semons, a founder and strategic planning partner of the agency IPNY. “We have to constantly be challenging ourselves to make the work better.”
