Dr. William H. Morris is Chief Medical Officer at Tennr, an AI-powered healthcare automation platform, and brings extensive leadership experience from roles at Google Cloud Healthcare and Life Sciences and Cleveland Clinic.
When Jake Mazanke joined Imagine 360 as head of communications, one of his first hires was the broadcast journalist Sydney Moran to lead multimedia. Moran had started out her career in local news, making her way up from a producer role to on air correspondent. Mazanke saw an opportunity to create a trove of video content, where Moran could talk to employers, benefits leaders and members across the country about topics like the healthcare affordability crisis.
Within a year, his team launched a multimedia program to spotlight broker and benefits consultant partners featuring high-quality video interviews and companion articles. The ROI? “The content was also incorporated into marketing campaigns that reached brokerage and consulting firms responsible for roughly 30% of new business that year,” he said.
As newsrooms around the country continue to lay off staff, healthcare companies see a new opportunity.
The traditional strategy involves turning reporters into public relations professionals. Instead, smart companies are recruiting their very own in-house journalist to do what they do best, storytelling. In the process, they’re finding a far greater ROI in building brand awareness in a market where attention is a scarce commodity.
According to comms pro Jacquelyn Miller, a former strategist who is now in-house at virtual care consulting company General Medicine, journalists who take PR jobs face a fairly steep learning curve. Journalism and public relations are not the same role. So this new trend actually leverages the skillsets of a trained journalist - good editorial judgement and writing skills - more directly.
What’s the backdrop? Well, as newsrooms close, it’s become harder than ever to land media. Earned media, meaning publicity gained through organic channels, is “no longer a viable primary channel for most companies,” notes Miller. And yet, compelling writing does stand out in an era of AI.