Twenty Years of PR - Is Past Prologue?
This post will kick off a series of twenty posts in symbolic commemoration of the twenty year anniversary of Schwartz Communications and our twenty years of work representing some of the most exciting biopharma and medtech companies and developments to from the past two decades. Going forward you’ll be hearing from more of us in the healthcare group at Schwartz as well as others whom we’ve been fortunate enough to meet along our twenty years in the business.
So much has changed during this time. Yet much has stayed the same for the medical marketer and PR pro. The essence of our work has stayed essentially constant - To effectively and accurately convey our client’s messages to critical constituencies. Clinicians. Advocacy groups. Payers. Patients. We still have that same jaw-dropping reaction when we first hear of a new, amazing scientific advance that has the potential to change the standard of care. And we still get an exhilarated feeling of accomplishment when we realize that our work has been directly responsible for improving the quality of patient lives and in numerous campaigns over the past two decades — actually saving lives. No other PR discipline can top that.
But changes abound. While twenty years ago we were on the virtual dawn of e-mail popularity, today the Internet has dramatically changed the very essence of communication. Patients are now vastly more informed than their mothers and fathers, with access to vital information that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. This has helped to drive and shape the way we conduct PR campaigns. We’ve been through several recessions that have changed the landscape of the newsroom. The role, size and mission of the traditional print and broadcast media have been recast, while online media has added a new, vital channel for medical marketers. And now we are in the embryonic stages of a whole new form of communication - social media - that offers vast opportunities to build and communicate to disease and treatment-specific communities.
The managed-care environment has transformed the way that new advances are ultimately delivered to the marketplace and paid for, which affects not only the availability of care but also the context of many a healthcare PR campaign. Much needed levels of transparency between researchers, scientists and clinicians and the companies for whom they work are now in place. This is a good thing.
Who can predict with certainty what the next 20 years will hold? One thing we know is true. The spirit of innovation will drive new therapies and diagnostics. Who could have predicted 20 years ago that tiny, life-saving defibrillators would be virtually ubiquitous or that the most severe forms of epilepsy could be controlled not by drugs — but rather by a small implantable device, or that those suffering from renal disease could actually have life-prolonging dialysis in the comfort of their own homes, or that robotic radiosurgery would change the quality of life cancer patients?
We hope you enjoy this 20 year anniversary PRx Blog series, as you get to know the members of our practice group, healthcare innovators, members of the media and industry leaders.
Posted by Lloyd Benson on November 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM
