NEW YORK: Lippe Taylor Group has formed a strategic partnership with MedFluencers, a physician-founded healthcare provider (HCP) influencer marketing agency.
The collaboration aims to drive innovation in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors by efficiently and effectively delivering influencer and creator partnerships that consumers can trust and other HCPs find credible in peer-to-peer settings, Lippe Taylor Group said in a statement.
The agencies began working together earlier this year on an initial two year contract.
Lippe Taylor MD of creator marketing Corey Martin is leading the agency’s full service influencer marketing and creator studio team in the initiative alongside MedFluencers CEO Dr. Adam Goodcoff, cofounder and president of new business Sanjay Juneja and director of partnerships Nina Kate Allemond.
“A lot of people tend to think of influencers through a pretty myopic lens that’s very patient or consumer oriented, but we’ve seen for a decade now that doctors are talking to one another in social media to share recent abstracts and studies and perspectives on treatment guidelines,” Lippe Taylor Group CEO Paul Dyer said.
He added that the firms will make sure patients understand that these new medical advancements are available to them and that physicians are hearing about it in a timely manner.
The partnership will focus on several key areas, including benchmarking and pricing standardization for HCP influencer programming, education on compliance with the Sunshine Act through MedFluencer’s fair market value calculator, thought leadership initiatives, and ongoing client work, including creative ideation, joint new business initiatives and creator and influencer development, according to the firms.
The agencies are working to cultivate peer-to-peer and physician-to-patient relationships through digital personas, a method that did not previously exist among other companies, according to Dyer. While organizations have used spokespeople in the past, they have not leveraged health experts’ reach effectively.
“More people are trying to understand and they’re using TikTok and Instagram as a discovery tool,” Martin said. “It’s really important that healthcare brands and companies show up in social media and show up with the right creators that can help inform consumers the right way.”
MedFluencers pool of influencers is selective, requiring each influencer to be individually vetted and accepted by their platform Pulse, referencing credentials, any reports to the board, status and inability to practice medicine.
The agency’s influencers range from different specialties of medicine and positions from physician assistant, nurse and physical therapist, serving as short form creators posting to Instagram and TikTok and long form creators across YouTube and Twitter, spanning the “social media continuum,” according to Goodcoff.
“Our healthcare providers are seen by hundreds of millions every week across the world on social media and we’re excited to help get the word out about some of the most exciting, and frankly, life changing treatments and therapies and devices that are coming to market every year,” Goodcoff said.
Goodcoff has worked in the healthcare influencer space over the course of the last eight years. He has no prior PR or marketing experience, having learned “trial by fire” after starting MedFluencers due to the lack of communication and education around health during the pandemic.
Opening pharma to the influencer space breaks down the glass ceilings for younger physicians who previously only had opportunities to share their thoughts or findings during peer education meetings within the medical community, Dyer said. By educating accredited healthcare professionals how to share their ideas through social channels, the agencies are ensuring there is a broader swath of diverse voices being heard.
“We’re not just looking at physicians who have lots of followers because having lots of followers may not necessarily indicate credibility,” Dyer said. “We’re looking at who has lots of influence among other physicians, an audience that is extraordinarily well educated and are themselves a filter for who’s trustworthy.”
According to Martin, credentialed creators are the answer to disinformation spread during and in the wake of the pandemic.
The strategic partnership will not focus on specific social applications, but the agencies have seen cross pollination between TikTok and Meta properties when it comes to reaching their targeted audience.
While some social media outlets have faced threats of being banned, have rebranded or are newly launched, the influencer landscape is continuing to grow, according to Martin.
“In an economy where marketing budgets are atrophying, influencer marketing budgets aren’t; they’re being held to account which is one of the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing with MedFluencers,” Martin said. “We want to ensure that the influencer work that we do is highly accountable to the business goals that that our clients have for us, and that really is the maturation of the influencer marketing creator economy in general.”
Lippe Taylor’s work in medical aesthetics with Allergan Aesthetics, the creator of Botox and Juvederm, a cosmetic treatment referred to as filler – in addition to thousands of influencer contracts across the sector – is one of the reasons MedFluencers sought out the agency as a partner.
Budget information was not disclosed.
Founded in 2020, MedFluencers is a physician-created agency offering HCPs a network of healthcare professional creators from a variety of specialties and practices. The firm’s staff of 12 provides influencer and creator contracting and management, identification and consulting services, helping clients navigate the evolving landscape of influencer marketing.
The agency officially launched its services in January this year, following a string of legal work to understand how to get physicians who carry a license in the U.S. to be able to do regulated campaigns in a safe and compliant manner.
MedFluencers current and former clients include AstraZeneca, Ogilvy, Imre Health, Butterfly and Uber, among others.
Lippe Taylor Group reported a 48% revenue increase to $50 million in the U.S. in 2022, according to PRWeek’s 2023 Agency Business Report.
This story originally appeared on prweek.com.
