Publicis Healthcare realigns media management as Publicis Health Media

There is now a need “to think about and deliver solutions across a holistic media ecosystem—paid, earned owned, digital and traditional,”—and across a global geography, says Matt McNally, president of the newly structured Publicis Health Media (PHM) unit within Publicis Healthcare Communications Group (New York). The unit will work with pharma, health and wellness clients to deliver communications platforms across the growing diversity of communications channels relevant to healthcare: advertising, self-publishing, online search and related digital media and “traditional” communications, according to the company.

PHM draws on existing expertise within business units of Publicis, including the agencies Saatchi & Saatchi Health, Razorfish and Digitas Health, the Publicis Touchpoint Solutions field sales organization, as well as the parent, Publicis S.A. It will start out with a staff of around 120, and draw on media-buying and digital-content capabilities from within those agencies as well as a center of excellence in Paris. A key component of the strategy is to be able to tailor local media campaigns to the conditions of media practices within that locale. “Speaking broadly, the US is ahead of the rest of the world in things like social media, but behind some parts of the world in terms of communications technologies; for example, smartphone usage is much higher in Asia-Pacific than here,” says McNally. “There is a need to bridge that gap.”

Pharma companies are having a harder time managing global marketing campaigns, given that media and communication channels operate in different patterns in diverse parts of the world; while the content or messaging might be the same, the delivery platforms differ in their reach. “Today, media is changing faster than advertising is,” McNally sums up.