Our Health practice recently published a piece full of tips and tricks for navigating events and securing speaking opportunities, but that’s not always the only event “ask” we get from our clients. In fact, over the past year, we’ve increasingly been tasked with sourcing co-panelists and moderators to engage with our executives at high profile events. As a result, we’ve established best practices for selecting various types of speakers, and we’ve become quite adept at not only putting together a “Plan A,” but also a “Plan B” (and occasionally, a “Plan C”!). In this blog, we’ll share our top three learnings from a series of marquee events for health clients—both industry-specific and outside-industry.
Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health crisis on March 11, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has continuously disrupted every sector of healthcare – from public health to health tech to pharmaceuticals. Every key stakeholder group and facet of the industry felt the impact, including healthcare communicators.
This past week, I had the opportunity to attend SXSW 2023 for the first time to support a featured session we secured in partnership with our client Dexcom, a pioneer in continuous glucose monitoring for people with diabetes. I quickly learned in between the chips and queso, panel discussions, and brand pop-ups scattered across Austin that it’s easy for brands to get lost in the clutter of a conference that brings essentially every industry to one place.
Health tech companies continue to weather strong economic headwinds, layoffs across the industry and aging populations, making an effective public relations strategy more important than ever. These brands must be visible to succeed. But some teams focus so strongly on garnering media attention for their products and services that they forget a critical component of PR altogether: speaking engagements.
This year’s CES was a whirlwind – from the months of planning and execution around client activities to being surrounded by 100,000 fellow conference-goers – and I was blown away by the exciting technologies that have so much potential to change the world. I spent most of my time on the show floor of the Digital Health track, as this year represented the event’s most robust health programming to date with both a large industry presence and extensive expert speakers.
One of the most interesting aspects of PR is its potential is pretty much limitless. What PR is continues to evolve, as does what it means for brands. And that’s been an interesting thing to witness, particularly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s been encouraging to see over the years is how clients have continued to invest in – and prioritise – PR.
When I think of 2017, I reminisce a bit on a pandemic-free world we used to inhabit. So, I am grateful we are in a much better place now! That aside, 2017 was an exciting year for us, launching Allison+Partners in India and seeing the opportunity and the phenomenal prospect of the India market. As Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots forward but only backwards.” 2017 was only the precursor to PR’s increasing prominence on the centerstage. And as the pandemic showed later, companies placed even more importance on the need to over-communicate. I am glad that we had the opportunity to quickly build valuable relationships with our clients, demonstrating our value from the get-go to all the way through the worst of the pandemic to present day.
