Advertising Week

By STEPHANIE GRAYSON

Bad pun aside, there sincerely were a “healthy amount” of takeaways from the January 26th BDI Mobile Health Communications event in Manhattan, and not only for pharma folks and medical professionals.

I had a feeling when I first saw the agenda and list of roundtable topics that it would be time well spent, and that the @AdvertisingWeek community might find it interesting; the topics and speakers seemed compelling and diverse. So, one hellacious commute later, there I was at the CUNY Graduate Center of NY Midtown, ears ready to listen and thumbs ready for some real-time tweeting.

As a Twitter search of #bdi1 will surely show, there have already been plenty of tweets about this event by experienced healthcare and pharma professionals, as well as a Storify wrap-up by BDI with many tweets specific to those fields. This works out well; I’ll leave the health/pharma expertise to others and focus this blog post instead on takeaways from the BDI Mobile Health Communications event that would benefit people across almost any industry area.

Top 5 Takeaways from BDI Mobile Health Communications event (even if you’re not in pharma or medicine):

1). Apps may seem like a sexy, new answer, but don’t underestimate the power of good-old texting.

Dr. Malbon’s presentation on “Text in the City” – Mt. Sinai’s program for teen health education – showed that texting is not only a powerful means to reach out, but also a way to get both a timely and above average response rate from the text recipient. Be ready though! Send that text knowing that if you’re asking for a response, the next 12-to-24 hours will be when the majority of your responses will flood in.

2). Mobile, mobile, mobile!

It’s not enough to say it and acknowledge it – what is your company doing about it? Is your company taking steps in 2012 toward either a mobile-optimized website and/or mobile-friendly design? (Don’t know the difference? Check out this presentation slide from Shire’s Xavier Petit that I tweeted during BDI, which displays it nicely.)

There was a lot of buzzing in both the auditorium and roundtable areas amongst participants about how the mobile ad spend is currently estimated in the low billions, and that over the next three years or so, it is projected to increase exponentially.

Basically:

You snooze, you lose.

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