It has become a running bit in our weekly edit meeting. Someone brings up a trend or idea, and we launch into spirited discussion about potential coverage. Without fail, whether 90 seconds or 18 minutes into the debate, some variation on the phrase “since COVID” is uttered and …

… it kills the room dead.

As health journalists, we devoted quite a bit of attention to COVID-19 during the pandemic peak of 2020 and 2021, producing a daily dispatch that ran for a full year before it was dialed back. We’ve spent plenty of time covering it ever since, given its bulldozing effect on everything from sane air travel to our office holiday party. There are plenty of other topics to which we’d prefer devoting pixels and pages. Like AI. AI is exciting and scary and revolutionary and a little bit lawless. Everybody wants more AI, right?

And still we come back to COVID, because its undeniable arrival in March 2020 remains the definitive before/after demarcation of our time. Hybrid work, telehealth, QR codes — they occupied a negligible amount of our collective mindspace up until that fateful month and plenty of it ever since.

I bring this up to properly frame the two central features of MM+M’s March-April print edition. Ordinarily, the headline for an MM+M Healthcare Marketers Trend Report that revealed an upward spike in marketing budgets would be something as grandly evocative as “marketing budgets spike upward.” However, this year the data require greater contextualization: Increases were up more for digital tactics and channels than for traditional ones.

Could this have something to do with the end of the blockbuster-drug era and the armies of sales reps assembled in its service? Maybe. Or it could just be that the shift to all-NPP-all-the-time during the pandemic’s first nine months awakened marketers to a more effective way of stretching their dollars.

Then there’s the return of MM+M’s Healthcare Marketing Influencer 25 for the first time since 2020, when it was jointly produced with sister title PRWeek as the Health Influencer 50. This year’s list includes CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch and Walmart chief medical officer Dr. John Wigneswaran, whose organizations became true point-of-care providers over the course of the last few years. They may have been headed in that direction anyway, but the pandemic clearly opened their eyes to unmet need in many of the communities they serve.

As the weekly death counts make clear, COVID remains a present-tense concern. It’s going to be a while before its shadow ceases to loom over everything in its wake.

From the April 01, 2024 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media