Shivani is an Account Director based out of our London office, with experience working across various accounts and therapy areas. Shivani recently visited WebSummit on behalf of Havas Lynx to explore some of the key trends in digital content marketing and health tech, that we look to incorporate into our daily work to create helpful change and positive outcomes.

The WebSummit in Lisbon was an exciting few days of creatives, marketers, industry leaders, investors and start-ups from around the world coming together to discuss everything from advances in digital and content strategies for millennials through to a changing healthcare landscape and a few start-ups paving the way.  The conference had over 50,000 attendees joining 21 different conferences, ranging from those specifically focused on discussing the ever-growing interest in artificial intelligence and robotics to those showcasing innovative thinking through various start-ups and solutions that are disrupting industries worldwide.

On Day 1, I attended various conferences aimed at marketers and content creators from all industries and found some interesting takeaways specific to healthcare, particularly around keeping patients at the heart of everything we do. One of the most interesting sessions was from Philips, around lessons in cross-sector innovation. Here we learnt how we can use some of the key takeaways from aviation to address the global health care challenge we currently face, with the growing rates of cancer, respiratory diseases, diabetes and hypertension worldwide. The session also included an interesting discussion around innovation in ecosystems and using analytics for improvement. Another session from Gary Briggs, CMO of Facebook, focused on the importance of mobile for building our brands in a digital world, which is particularly relevant for many of the patient support materials we develop. Gaining traction with millennials and our key audiences in healthcare has become progressively challenging with the increasing noise particularly in the mobile landscape, with Facebook and Twitter dominating.

After an interesting evening in Lisbon on Tuesday night with all eyes on the U.S. Presidential Election, the opening of Wednesday’s summit was a discussion around the new President-elect’s potential impact for the tech landscape throughout the world. Throughout the day the sessions were very much focused on content creation and the importance of developing appropriate content that is channel agnostic to leave messages that resonate with customers. The most interesting talk for me was from one of the the co-founders of Reddit who spoke about the age of authenticity that we currently live in. He discussed the need for more natural, unedited content that our audiences can relate to, giving them a reason to feel connected to brands and their offerings. I found this extremely relevant to the work we do, as several of the brands we work with have to overcome the stigma big pharma carries. It is always challenging to prove commitment to better patient outcomes without commercial incentive; however, the way we market our products and produce content and offerings to meet the needs of our customers, can help overcome this perception and reveal our true commitment to healthcare.

The final day of the WebSummit was focused on healthcare and was especially interesting in that there was one major theme that came across all talks—the shift of the current healthcare system towards a more consumer focused model. Gary Mudie, CTO of Babylon Health, discussed the model of on-demand healthcare and whether that means sacrificing quality for convenience or whether this is a shift in the landscape that those in healthcare need to consider. Dr. Kyu Rhee, CHO of IBM, discussed Watson Health and how it’s humanely impossible to keep up with the knowledge and data available to us these days, especially for HCPs. The presentation of Patient Innovation Awards was particularly inspiring showing ideas from patients and carers being brought to life by various collaborators, helping those affected address the challenges they regularly face through tech and innovation and improving both patient and carer outcomes.  WebSumit was a fantastic few days of learning and hearing about the latest trends, not only in digital healthcare and innovation, but also across other industries. Leaving inspired we can undoubtedly learn from these new developments and incorporate them into our work, ultimately ensuring we maximise positive outcomes for patients.