Marketing firm QualityHealth says a partnership with website iVillage will potentially expose more women to its pharma-sponsored content while giving clients better control over DTC media spend.
The deal adds scale—in the form of iVillage’s audience of more than 30 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore—to QualityHealth’s marketing platform, which serves up health tools, discounts and other content on behalf of pharmaceutical brands to the roughly 22 million patients who have opted into its database.
The deal is “a way for us to access health-minded women and start to engage them and interest them in relevant health programs,” QualityHealth CEO Rob Rebak told MM&M.
QualityHealth’s content-based tools and resources will be placed throughout the iVillage site. When consumers interact with those elements, they get linked back to the QualityHealth site where they may be introduced to product-related messaging, Rebak said, adding that his firm deals with about 75% of the major drug companies.
Pharma is also a “sizable percentage” of iVillage’s business, said Jodi Kahn, EVP of the female-oriented website. “We get to be closer to the pharmaceutical marketing community through QualityHealth.”
Once users migrate from iVillage.com to QualityHealth’s system to interact with its marketing programs, sponsors pay on a performance-based model, that is, only for the individual marketing actions they are looking to drive, such as a doctor conversation about a brand. IVillage will get a portion of revenue from users who originated on its site. Beyond content sharing, product co-development and revenue sharing on display ads (iVillage agreed to rep ad sales on QualityHealth.com as part of the deal), no money changed hands on either side.
From the October 01, 2010 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
