Welcome to Amy’s Spotlight: From Hollywood to Healthcare. The blog will periodically provide commentary from Amy Doner, President and Founder of The Amy Doner Group, an established celebrity and talent procurement agency specializing in the pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare industries. Amy will offer her perspective on the influence celebrity, pop culture and related trends can have on today’s health-minded world and your business.
Amy’s Spotlight: Celebrity Spokespersons and Pharmaceutical Companies
Typically how common are the diseases and medical conditions The Amy Doner Group is asked to align with a celebrity?
Chronic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and arthritis are among the most common medical conditions here in the United States. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly half of all American adults have at least one chronic illness. As these types of diseases can also be the most preventable, celebrity health awareness campaigns could then have the opportunity to make a tremendous impact. By partnering with a celebrity to foster disease awareness and prevention for the more common and well known diseases, many more lives have the potential to be saved if the affected public heeds the message. To that end, these areas of health still comprise a lot of our searches and where celebrity involvement can be an important component to an already integrated marketing communications strategy.
Is there a benefit to retaining a celebrity to foster awareness for smaller, lesser known diseases – even though considered to be rare – that only affect a small subset of the population?
The celebrity recruitment process, especially for health-related causes, is not one-size-fits all. Awareness campaigns can be just as important for health issues where symptoms may not be as evident, there is lower prevalence, and treatment options are perhaps lesser known. It can be just as impactful to consider a celebrity partnership for a well-known disease as it can for a smaller medical issue that may need to gain more traction to the public. In fact, a celebrity partnership may just be the element needed to help make that traction. For example, for diseases considered to be lesser-known – or carrying a stigma not so widely covered – The Amy Doner Group has worked on campaigns for irritable bowel syndrome, stress urinary incontinence and low testosterone. As some of these conditions are not necessarily water cooler topics of conversation, public awareness should help to drive a dialogue between patients and medical experts without shame or embarrassment.
Is the Amy Doner Group asked to research celebrities for those disease of the day or month type of programs? Do you believe those “moments in time” are as newsworthy as they perhaps once were?
The Amy Doner Group is asked to provide searches for companies interested in working with celebrities for something as finite as a targeted two-hour sales meeting, or large as a years-long media outreach platform. It is our goal to engage a celebrity where the effects can be long-lasting, even if the celebrity time commitment need not be. Whether it be a disease awareness day, week or month these more finite, calendar-driven programs can still be impactful, especially when social media can remind all key publics of the immediacy of these initiatives the moment they are announced.
Post a question or comment here. For more information about The Amy Doner Group, go to AmyDonerGroup.com