Owing to the breadth of its central theme and the furious pace of change in nearly every health-media segment, MM+M’s annual Media Issue is our most challenging to assemble. It might also be our most misleadingly named.
Among the pandemic’s many wake-up calls was one reminding us that, without our collective health, pretty much everything else grinds to a halt. That blindingly-obvious-in-hindsight realization had the effect of turbocharging the expansion of the health-media ecosystem.
In other words: All media is, to some extent, health media — and every story MM+M writes, podcast it records or event it stages has a media component. It’s not just a topic we survey once a year in between deconstructions of the patient journey.
The growth of health media has made our coverage of it more honest. It has effectively sounded a warning signal to journalists of all stripes: If you can’t find a health angle in a story you’re crafting, you’re likely missing a big chunk of it.
New players abound, with technologists, data wonks and influencers joining the publishers that colonized the space during the analog era. There’s a plausible argument to be made that big-tent lifestyle brands such as Apple and Lululemon are health brands.
The content of this year’s Media Issue speaks to that richness of experience. “A Public Health Call to Arms” unpacks the Food and Drug Administration’s long-awaited guidance on medical misinformation, while “In a Point of Care State of Mind” chronicles the channel’s encroachment far beyond the walls of the waiting room.
And what would any modern-day feature well be without a healthy heaping of AI? We bypass the robots-are-coming-for-your-job-and-maybe-your-dessert hysteria and instead assess its potential impact on content creation (“The AI Personalization Dilemma”) and influencer marketing (“Will AI Kill the Health Influencer?”).
The latter feature, written by ace MM+M senior reporter Lecia Bushak, serves as a litmus test for supposedly tech-forward pharma marketers. Would you ever consider allying yourself with an incorporeal, algorithmically constructed influencer? Or does your risk tolerance top out at collaborating with providers and patients who have established social-media presences, however swayable and, well, human they might prove?
Questions like these are what makes health media such fascinating terrain to explore. In our weekly The Third M media column and at our third in-person Media Summit, scheduled for November 6 in New York City, we plan to take an even deeper dive. Don’t hesitate to add your voices to the conversation.
From the August 01, 2024 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
