All public health marketing to be in partnership with brands
The body that develops marketing activity to support the Government’s health strategy says it will never launch a marketing campaign unless in partnership with an external organisation.
Unveiling its marketing strategy for the current financial year, Public Health England (PHE) says it will look to co-create campaigns to create lower-cost activity that has the potential to reach more people.
In a report detailing the strategy PHE cited the forthcoming Change4Life campaign in partnership with Disney , which will see content running on the media giant’s kids’ shows, as an example of how it hopes to produce more for less.
The report adds: “There are thousands of people and organisations with experience, local knowledge, expertise, channels, and capacity that we do not have. By working together with more and more of those individual and organisational partners who have an interest in improving health we will ensure broader engagement, higher cut-through, better value for money and better results.”
PHE claims to have the largest partnerships team in Government. It says it already has 214 key national and 70,000 local partners.
In-kind marketing support provided by commercial partners has been increasing year on year since the coalition took office 2010 and slashed marketing budgets. PHE says it received £52m from partners in the previous financial year to March 2014.
Elsewhere, content marketing will increasingly be employed in an attempt to get greater cut-through again with an emphasis on lowering costs.
For example, the report says it will look to create more “participative events” such as anti-smoking drive “Stoptober”, PHE says it got 250,000 signs ups last year, and create more free to air TV and radio “fillers”.
PHE says it will also adopt a real-time marketing approach by launching activity “packaged and practised” in order to “respond to events more effectively”.
“If there is a media story about sugar levels in foods or a celebrity stopping smoking”, the report offers as examples.
It continues: “Over the course of this strategy we will deliver more agile, more interactive, more frequent, lower-cost content using a broader range of methodologies and partners that drive change for more specific target audiences.”
PHE says it will invest £53m of taxpayer’s money in marketing in the year to March with Change4Life, SmokeFree and the Government’s dementia awareness drive taking the lion’s share.
