Jack O’Brien speaks with Alix Hart, chief marketing officer at Verily, about the company’s culturally competent campaigns to meet underserved populations that have been historically difficult to reach for clinical trial recruitment.

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From HLTH 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s the MM+M Podcast.

I’m Jack O’Brien digital editor at mmm. Please be joined at the health conference in lovely Las Vegas by Alex Hart of verily how are you doing? I’m

doing great happy to be here.

I know it’s your first Health conference and we’ll get into that but I want to start off by going to the verily rebranding effort. If you want to give our audience a little bit of an insight into that whole process we can start there.

Oh, absolutely. We’re really excited to come to health as a rebranded company fairly. So we’ve been fairly for eight years for eight years young and we felt it was like a moment this year for us to really tell a better story to the market on the portfolio that we have today and what we’re bringing to Market. So I’ve been a part as a marketer of Rebrand efforts renaming probably six or seven times in my career and I would have to say this is this is one of the most meaningful because

Truly had a chance to tell the story of verily in a more cohesive way. So what we’ve done this year is we’ve we’ve rebranded the look and feel of the verily logo. We brought our new website to life at verily.com. And we renamed some of the aspects of our portfolio because we thought in particular it was a little more difficult for the market to understand what we offer and we have a mutually reinforcing set of solutions around clinical research and then another set of solutions around care and to really showcasing how our Solutions fit together for customers was another part of our strategy and so now on verily.com, you can really shop and understand the benefits of mutually reinforcing Solutions and how we might be able to work together with a customer on everything from clinical studies to Patient recruitment to new reinventions of Registries and longitudinal data.

It’s so interesting here you talk about I know our audience obviously being Marketing Executives are probably so interested in understanding, you know, kind of the nuts and bolts of how that rebranding effort.

In terms of inception to execution if you could kind of walk us through that. I think that’d be really meaningful.

Absolutely. It was a long process. We really took the time to think about and explore how different aspect.

The brand design could come to life from small components to large. So just think about like verily has apps that we deliver for customers into endpatients and participants and those apps have the brand showing up in very small ways and little icons and and tools and we want to engage patients and participants in really great experiences. So we thought about really small like, how does the branch show up in those apps and in products, but also, you know like here at Health, right? How do we show up in a in a big way to customers on on large signage and and ways that we can bring it to life we recreated we actually created our first logo for Fairly. So we really thought about what’s the story behind what that logo could represent and so one of the aspects that we really talk about a lot at fairly is how data can help close gaps close gaps between research and care close gaps between you know, data and patient outcomes. And so we really thought about bringing together what we see in our logo is the combination of a square and a triangle and we’ve done a lot of really interesting.

Animations about how that square and triangle come together. We really think about that as different things like Tech and The Human Experience ways that like the harder side of the square representing that data and technology and then the triangle representing the personalization and the human interactions that we have every day and how verily is uniquely suited to bring those things together.

It’s so interesting here you talk about, you know, obviously these kind of different concepts and actually, you know, actualizing them for your your organization. I mentioned at the top of your first time at Health. What is the experience been like at the conference? I know it can seem overwhelming. It’s thousands of people it’s Las Vegas. It’s the whole, you know King caboodle, but what’s been like for you

so interesting for me. I’ve been to so many conferences outside the industry. I came from other Industries like retail and security and so kind of coming into the healthcare space and seeing how how health is done has been really really interesting. The networking opportunities have been great the opportunity to see real leaders in healthcare across so many aspects of the healthcare ecosystem and hear the vision, I think.

Heard a lot across the panels on where Health where Healthcare is going and what transformation looks like. I mean everything from you know perspectives on the regulatory space to thinking about digital Therapeutics to just thinking about how we as Leaders can really lead transformation

and I’m really kind of curious too that when you look out you brought up how important Health Data is and obviously improving patient outcomes really changing the way that our system operates when you look at the landscape now, where do you see room for improvement on the Health Data front because I know a lot of people say, hey we need to have more data. We need to have better refine data, but it’s easy to say that and it’s harder to actually say this is how we actually have to put into place.

It’s so true and I think you know, I’m really proud of verily and how the perspective that we’re taking across product and Technology to bring high quality data sets together to think about curation of data so that we can help accelerate clinical research. We can inform different parts of the care care ecosystems and from a product side, like that’s very meaningful to verily I think as a marketer, you know, I really

Think a lot about the patient experience. How do we actually inform like that experience through better data sets and I’m just really excited about thinking about how we can employ better diversity by Design principles. So we invest in marketing a lot about thinking about how do we make our experiences to patients and participants really relevant to the audience that we’re talking to? How do we inform in different ways like even from the you know from the aspects of our creative process, how do we design ads up front that are representative of many different people we do that through different animations different ways of use like photography and how we have diverse representation. But every aspect of that becomes data that can inform how people are clicking engaging moving on to enroll in a clinical study or just take that next step to learn more and it must be so

interesting coming from very least perspective because obviously there are a lot of you know Blue Chip Legacy institutions here you think of whatever sort of Pharma or

Healthcare brand but verily is relatively new by comparison, but that does give you a sort of Advantage. I imagine as a leader to say. Hey, we can Market different we can think about the industry different we can disrupt in a different way that is Meaningful for patients down the line.

I think that’s right. I think we’ve you know, we’ve really tried to to lead and really kind of think of new ways that we can kind of bring experiences together. We really think about kind of connecting how we approach different marketing channels and really kind of use the underlying data analytics to inform like how people are navigating their web and digital experiences.

What can we expect from verily down the line? Obviously, you’re coming off this rebranding effort. There are other things that you can give us a sneak preview for that are readers or marketers in our audience to keep

you specifics.

Are so much on the horizon. We continue to engage on how to bring the brand to life how to really Drive awareness of some of the new products that verily is working on. So I think 2024 is going to be a really exciting year for us.

Are there any sort of Trends just industry why that you’re paying attention to them? Maybe some of the people in our audience should be keeping an eye on certainly as it relates to the data or innovation front.

I mean, I think we talked a little

diversity by

Justin you to be a big area for us. We have a director of a Health Equity Center of Excellence fairly. Who is Dr. Vandell, Washington. These are chief clinical officer for care as well. And we spend a lot of time thinking about how to bring the diversity principles into everything we do from product to marketing to the rest of the organization and one of the things we talk about a lot that I think is really exciting is thinking about the data layer and

How do we actually ensure that what fairly is doing are really and how we partner with the industry how we think about bias and algorithms and how we make sure that the data that we’re using to inform a lot of these decisions and you know kind of how we Implement technology is leveraging those principles and how we make sure that we’re preventing bias through things like, you know Ai and algorithms.

It’s so interesting here you talk about the bias aspect because I think a lot of people are very enthused by the rollout this technology, but they also realize it’s not perfect and there are things that still need to be worked out if it’s gonna live up to its potential in terms of improving patient outcomes or fixing other flaws or in the Healthcare System.

Exactly, right? I mean, just just think if if the data that the algorithms are built on never included a representative sample.

The population you know, how do we ensure that that you know, that that’s actually delivering Equitable outcomes.

Excellent. Well Alex, I’ve really appreciate you being on the show. I have to ask you the question that we’ve asked every executive that we’ve had in the podcast so far, which is obviously outside of the health conference. There is all of Las Vegas. There are concerts. They’re shopping casinos. You name it? What is the one thing you look forward to when you come to Las Vegas obviously outside of the business conference.

Do you know one of the things that it’s

brought a lot of the marketing team out in our Communications team out to this conference this year and it’s really funny. You know, I think when we we all have kind of lived over the last few years and remote work, you know, we spend a lot of our time disconnected or trying to find those ways to connect so it’s been really great to do that in Vegas live as a team

it certainly good to be back to those kind of in-person events as opposed to the virtual conferences. We had to put up with for a few years.

Absolutely right?

Awesome. Well Alex again, really appreciate you being on the show and offering your insights as always.

Thanks so much.