Consumers are taking a much more active role in managing their personal health and the health needs of their loved ones. Good Health Advertising saw the opportunities this brings for advertisers and created ad sales partnerships with more than 30 high-quality health, medical and healthy living Web sites, offering advertisers a monthly reach of more than 6 million health-information consumers.
“Internet has become the most accessible and commonly utilized resource for getting your hands on excellent quality health information for various reasons,” said Robert Kadar, founder of GHA. “The Internet is quick, convenient and confidential.”
Consumer access to healthcare information is increasingly moving online. According to a recent Forrester Research Health Report, 84 percent of online consumers have researched healthcare topics online in the past 12 months, and 81 percent have visited healthcare Web sites.
According to TNS Media Intelligence, since 1997, when the FDA relaxed the rules on pharmaceutical television marketing, drug advertising surged to $5.3 billion in 2006, up 14 percent from 2005. In this way, ad spending in the pharma sector grew faster than that of any other industry among the top 10 spenders, including autos and telecom. And the three most heavily advertised drugs – Lunesta, Ambien CR and Cymbalta – were approved in the past three years.
GHA will represent health-focused Web publishers featuring content on many of the most pressing health issues facing Americans today, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
Among the sites represented by GHA are MedHelp.org; WrongDiagnosis; OPTIMIZERx; EVTV1; TheDiabeticDiet; Eat2GetFit.com; HealthCastle.com; Diet.com and Spine-Health.com.
The users on these sites may be interested in health club memberships, spa vacations, nutritional supplements, hospital and physician advertising, skin care treatments, and diet and weight-loss treatments.
Inventory will be sold on a site-specific basis or will be aggregated by similar audiences from each site to provide healthcare, medical and pharmaceutical marketers with an opportunity to reach potential customers.
GHA will offer advertisers reach to consumers interested in healthy living and healthy lifestyle content.
“Search is so ubiquitous now – about half of consumers start their online health activity via a search engine and thus end up visiting a number of sites,” Kadar said. “Good Health Advertising exists to support the efforts of these smaller but high-quality providers of health content by providing them with advertising and sponsorship sales solutions.”
With these partnerships health advertisers get to extend their reach online by running on sites that they might not otherwise have access to.
“The top health Web sites still reach a relatively small percentage of the online audience, and there is a long-tail of high-quality health publishers that collectively reach tens of millions of consumers every month,” Kadar noted.
The challenge facing many agencies and their clients is that the Internet is constantly changing and growing. Quite a few of the top 25 health-information publishers, as ranked by comScore Media Metrix, didn’t even exist a year or two ago. At the same time, brand marketers are constantly looking for new ways to reach their target audience.
