UPDATE: June 4, 2009. I’ve updated this post to correct a fact about RealAge. RealAge does not sell email addresses to any third party. However, as described originally by the New York Times, “RealAge sends the selected recipients a series of e-mail messages about a condition they might have, usually sponsored by a drug company that sells a medication for that condition.”

They might seem like an odd grouping, but I’m prepared to tell you how RealAge, Wii Fit, and pharma marketing all connect. For those not familiar, RealAge is a test you can take that purports to be able to tell you your body’s actual age versus simply your calendar age. By answering a number of questions (that seem to go on forever), it spits out a number that’s supposed to tell you if you’re actually older or younger than your years. Factors like family history, diet, exercise, and past medical conditions are all considered. According to the folks at RealAge, their test, The RealAge Test, is “ the first measurement standard for healthcare.” Really? I thought something like an x-ray or maybe a complete blood count might be both more first and more standard.

It came as a dramatic shock to people (not me) when in March of this year it was revealed that RealAge was selling your test results and email addresses to was sending emails to users based on their test results, which were sponsored by <cue foreboding music> big pharma. The New York Times broke the story and the outrage ensued. Of course, RealAge’s privacy policies say that they will sell your information stating quite plainly: “we will share your personal data with third parties to fulfill the services that you have asked us to provide to you.” Not, we might, we will. During this outrage, I pointed out one minor detail that people left out. Many people actually would welcome email from pharma companies and their products. In fact, I’d just written about it that same day. Turns out people were open to learning about pharma products from pharma companies via email. Email from a pharma company ranked above offline advertising and even above email from their doctor. So, perhaps the whole RealAge uproar wasn’t that big of a deal. People may have actually gotten useful information, targeted to their condition, at a time when they were open to hear about solutions. Isn’t that good for everyone?

The problem with RealAge’s solutions is that they simply leave you on your own to solve the problems it uncovers. It may say you need to reduce cholesterol and fat in your diet to get your “RealAge” higher, but there isn’t a consistent, long-term plan that you can follow. You need to go elsewhere for that. Where there are plans, they don’t fit into the current routines of people instead requiring them to change their behavior (e.g., like logging onto the same site everyday) so that they can change their behavior (e.g., like diet). It just doesn’t make sense.

So, let me move onto Wii Fit. If you haven’t heard of Wii Fit, I don’t know what to tell you. It became the single biggest game (really a platform though) in history surpassing Halo 3′s 6 million units back in March. At $85 a unit, that’s $510 million in sales. Not a bad start for any media. According to Nintendo, “Wii Fit is a combination of fitness and fun, designed for everyone, young and old. By playing Wii Fit a little every day, you, your friends, and your family can work towards personal goals of better health and fitness.”

I’ve talked in the past about how gaming could be one of the biggest future marketing tactics available to pharma. As for Wii Fit, Nestle has already sponsored a game on the system called Active Life: Outdoor Challenge. The promotion supports it’s Aquapod brand. I’m not recommending pharma sponsor a game on the Wii, though that might be interesting. I’m instead saying they should make a game for Wii. Unheard of you say? Making a game solely to promote your product? Tell that to Burger King who sold more than 3 million copies of its Burger King themed games at $3.99 each. Granted, not the same regulatory constraints, but conceptually, it can be done.

So, why the Wii Fit? Simple. Every pharma company seems to be moving towards the realization that simply providing information about its products isn’t enough. You also have to create programs that help people achieve the goals that your medication is designed to provide. In other words, if your drug is for dyslipidemia, you should also be helping me reduce cholesterol in my diet and getting me started on an exercise regimen. These connections, these valuable services, are what will help people stay on treatment and also improve the public perception of pharma. What I’m saying is that pharma needs to start creating programs that help keep people off their medications or get people off them sooner. A statement like that might get me banned from every pharma company in the world, but there it is. Is this unheard of?

Nope. Talk to the folks at Tylenol who have created an entire advertising campaign around encouraging you NOT to take Tylenol. They’re showing you how to avoid the very headaches they treat.

So, how are you helping people avoid your hypertension medication? How are you helping to get people off your cholesterol drug? How are you helping people be healthier as they take your chemotherapy as part of their cancer treatment? Wii Fit might be one way. Rather than create a complex and very expensive platform on your own site that tracks progress, maintains profiles, allows for goal setting, and many other complex features, why not use a platform that already exists and is in millions of homes? Here’s what one of the tracking screens from the Wii looks like (and no, not mine, so don’t worry, Mom):

With all of your marketing efforts, you’re trying to fit into people’s daily lives. It’s not supposed to interrupt, but typically it does (I’m looking at you DTC TV). More and more companies are figuring out this isn’t working and instead they are turning to marketing efforts that actually add value to people’s lives (read all about it at Marketing with Meaning).  People are already using their Wii. They are using it quite regularly. If your messages are available here, then they are fitting into where people are. Check. But, they can also be meaningful if you manage to incorporate them into a game that’s helping make people get healthier.

One additional advantage of this is that you can reward people for ongoing compliance, as they can report if they are still taking your product when they log onto the Wii. The way I’ve seen pharma companies reward people today is to require them to log into a website each day and report that they took their daily dosage. Isn’t requiring that people remember to log into a site each day kind of silly? Recall that these are people who aren’t remembering to (or choosing not to) take their medication already. Why would they remember your site everyday? Since they are using their Wii regularly, it doesn’t require a behavior change to be part of your program. Your program, which may involve changes in diet and exercise, is already a major change, so why add another change to their routine? Instead, fit it in with their current activities. For many people, this includes Wii Fit. This is much different than many other online programs offer. They expect you to log in everyday to figure out your routine, but this is already a change. People can only take so much.

Rather than investing $20 million in DTC TV this year (again…with questionable results), why not take 20% of that and create something meaningful and long-lasting? You can provide a service to your customers and do something that no one in the industry has tried before. The recognition and PR alone would be worth the expense. For reference, there’s one game out there that has already shown a business result is possible in healthcare (my take here). Hope Lab created a game called  Re-Mission. This game was created to help kids fighting various cancers. It’s essentially a first-person shooter-type game, but you’re battling the disease. Kids playing the game showed: “Adherence to at-home medication (trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and 6 mercaptopuring) was significantly improved in the intervention group compared with the control group.” Just playing this game improved adherence. It was compared to playing a game not related any disease. You can read the results  that were published in the journal, Pediatrics.

Go out and get yourself a Wii Fit. If you can’t figure out how to create something that might help your target audience of patients after playing for an hour, I don’t know what to tell you besides give me a call and I’ll help figure it out for you.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Gaming To Save Healthcare Marketing
2. The Only Way Pharma Can Improve Compliance: Fun
3. How Marketing with Meaning Can Save Pharma — Part 3