Here we interview Robert Kadar, founder/CEO of Good Health Advertising. If you read our blog, you know our view-- PHRs are booming, in part because they're free to the consumer, and ad-monetized.
1. Tell us about Good Health Advertising-- what do you do, and how do you help your partners make more money than they could if they, say, ran Google AdSense?
ANSWER: Good Health Advertising represent high-quality Medical and Healthy Living Web publishers for advertising and sponsorship sales opportunities. Research shows that as much as 85% of the online health-focused consumer audience begins their online activity at a search engine. As a result, everyday millions of online consumers bypass the most well-known and established health “portals” and end up visiting smaller more niche sites – many of whom offer excellent quality content but are simply not household names. Good Health Advertising partners with the best of these emerging and up-and-coming Medical and Health sites, categorizes, organizes and packages their audiences so that that the top Pharma and health brands can easily advertise on these sites. With an experienced and talented national sales team in place calling on all of the top interactive advertising agencies and their clients, we’re in a unique position to drive value for our partner sites while providing a valuable audience aggregation service for our clients.
2. Who are some of the firms with which you work on both sides, if you can disclose-- advertisers and publishers?
ANSWER: We work with many of the interactive advertising agencies such as AvenueA-Razorfish, Beyond Interactive, Digitas Health, Mindshare and more representing many of the top pharma and OTC brands synch as Wyeth, AstraZeneca, GSK, Novartis and many others. Some of the top-tier Web publishers we represent for advertising sales includes Spine-Health.com, MedHelp.org, WrongDiagnosis.com, Diet.com and many others.
3. Do you think the booming social networking space in eHealth is ready for advertising from big brands? Why or why not?
ANSWER: Online social networking is a growing and exciting trend that all brand marketers are investigating and considering. In the Health category, Pharma Brand Manager know that their customers are going online seeking out others experiencing similar medical conditions for support, knowledge and encouragement. I would say at this time that virtually all Pharma brands are trying to determine how to participate in these discussions and are weighing the potential risks and benefits. I predict that we will see more involvement on the part of the Pharma companies soon in this area through the creation of quasi-Social Networking environments. What I mean by this is that Pharma brands will create or support environments that provide the patient with some level of participation but in a controlled fashion to reduce real or perceived risks. There is a middle ground between a completely open, non-moderated forum environment and a traditional editorial environment. The first pharma brand that gets this right will reap significant rewards.
4. What are GHA's plans going forward-- how will you expand?
ANSWER: Good Health Advertising is constantly growing through the addition of new partners and digital marketing capabilities in the eHealth segment. For instance we recently starting representing the Health section of one of the largest online newspaper networks encompassing over 3000 local newspaper Web sites and their audience of close to 10MM unique monthly visitors. We also now represent one of the largest and highest-quality, condition-specific, double opt-in Patient Lists available in the industry. Over 50MM consumers and patients segmented into dozens of categories who have requested to receive information relevant to their personal medical situation.
5. What is the current growth rate and effective CPM you're seeing in online health advertising?
ANSWER: The Internet Advertising Bureau’s (www.IAB.net) most recent revenue report was for Q3-07 and showed a 25.3% increase over Q3-06. Exact figures in the Health arena are harder to find especially as the category of “Health” is hard to define. Certainly reports show that Pharma companies are still only allocating a small percentage of their overall media dollars to online marketing. But we certainly expect to see this increase and overall expect to see growth rates in the Health category to keep pace with if not outpace overall Internet advertising growth rates. CPMs are across the board depending upon the brand, the goal of the campaign, the site and more. We’ve seen everything from single-digit CPM’s up to the mid $30s. In general premium brands are willing to pay premium rates for high-quality, condition-specific placements and that’s the area in which we excel.
We cover the key Online Health/PHR/EMR companies in our wiki; the entire list is here. Should we be covering your company? Email us at mattc [@] marketintellnow.com.
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