It’s almost time… We hear from Emma Smith, Director of Marketing
It's almost time for the big reveal! But first, we hear from Emma Smith, Director of Marketing about the immense effort involved in developing and producing a TV campaign.
“When I think back to hearing the news that we we're buying Co-op Health, I remember there being real excitement around the room. We'd spent a long time looking at our digital strategy and there were a number of options on the table but Co-op Health felt like such a good fit.
“And then reality set in, we recognised that we had to create a brand from scratch…and fast! There aren’t many moments in your career where you get to create a brand and the development of what is now Hey Pharmacist is absolutely a career highlight for me.
“The next challenge - to develop a marketing campaign that would resonate with our members. From a marketing perspective, TV is the ultimate accolade - it's really exciting, but also utterly exhausting and terrifying.
“The starting point is to create campaign ideas you think might work and throw that into a testing phase. When you've got an idea of what's going to work, you start building mood boards, adcepts and TV scripts and you put those back into testing again, it might sound daft, but a single word can trigger a completely different response from customers. These steps are critical when you are investing in a multimillion pound campaign, you’re always looking for those small details that will prompt a customer to do something differently as a result of seeing your advert. For us that something is downloading the Hey Pharmacist app.’
“The next stage is media booking, we need to make sure we get as many eyeballs as possible to see the ad. We’re using an exciting new machine learning tool called Skyrise, it models customers based on their likes and dislikes and it knows which customers types are watching which channels at what time and automatically places the adverts in the right spot.
“These app means that our members can trade beyond their post code in a way they would never have been able to before and we're really proud of being the only player investing in digital on behalf of member pharmacies in this way.”