What it’s like to be the Creative Agency of Record for an $18.5B Acquisition
In a not long distant past (Fall 2020), Livongo and Teladoc merged to become the digital healthcare powerhouse of the future, creating a new standard of consumer-focused healthcare. Prior to its IPO, the company had moved through at least four other CMO’s reporting to the executive team, AKA “The ELT”. And in Jan 2019, one of the most powerful women in marketing came on board to lead branding, creative, digital, PR, events, channel and member marketing. And even after that time, I still had a freezing period (Feb 2021) before I could share my excitement about this powerfully transformable brand.
Prior to 2019, and Livongo’s historical IPO, noted as one of the most successful healthcare IPO’s of all time, the company was built on the backs of healthcare and product innovation leaders who understood the power of data and knew early the future of digital healthcare. However, the brand was relatively unknown on a commercial scale. As the company approached its IPO, a shift happened inside brand to help Wall Street understand what Livongo’s AI+ AI technology engine was building, to help understand how the company could spur an entire category, and to help them ‘feel good’ (in layman’s terms) as they were evaluating and determining their IPO pricing.
“Getting a lot of different opinions flooding into my inbox about Livongo today. But what no one (even critics) can fault the company on is its brand/marketing, which is at least half the battle if you’re in an emerging area of tech with few success stories to show for it.”
Christina Farr, CNBC (Christina Farr)
The Early Beginnings of Creative Testing
Our engagement started out with a quick test project on sales enablement — give sales a great product, and we can look at engaging further. No problem…
The immediate challenge was moving Livongo from analytic-focused to human-engaged. Starting with sales presentations, an external marketing communications test bed, our team deciphered how the team wanted to leverage its innovation to stand on the shoulders of what it meant to be a caring healthcare provider. First observations from their current marketing were a few things:
- There were very little humanistic images included in their materials.
- When there were humans, there was an extreme lack of diversity, even though their members were strongly represented by minority groups.
- In fact, there was no photo library to be had.
- Fonts were inconsistent, abrasive, and generalized
- Magenta was used as a highlight color for arbitrary reasons.
The biggest challenge overall, during our time studying healthcare marketing, is towing the fine line of compliance while maintaining the integrity of the content where features and benefits are so tightly defined that building beautiful design around lots…and I mean, LOTS of words is a challenge that only top designers would understand the levity of the situation.
Compromises Around Every Corner During the Creative Process
The client/agency relationship is historically a ‘Yes Ma’am’, one-way conversation. Clients provide a scope and usually want you to ‘make the magic happen!’ The best of these relationships result in being unafraid and moving towards a push-pull exchange where client expectations are met with above and beyond creative to push the boundaries. It allows both sides to imagine what creative could be, versus the status quo. We were in a position to create conversation, rather than take one-sided direction. Change isn’t always comfortable, and the status quo tends to build the bigger fence.
Here’s why — creative teams feel a sense of independence and expertise when developing brands. At the same time, corporate managers are given content and directives by decision makers (usually sales or product at this point), so while a one-page may be front and back, there is hardly any room to create delight with an enormity of text and committee direction.
Creating a space and open conversation to push back on what’s essential, defining the goals of the deliverable, and moving towards a compromise of creative meets product integrity intuitively lifts the quality overall. Our conviction was strong, and it showed.
An Internal Team That Understands the Power of Brand
As a creative partner to a marketing department of ~55 internal employees, we had a unique opportunity to crossover many of these teams to deliver high-end creative and directions across marketing communications. We set the stage with sales enablement for 10 different projects and probably 40+ rounds of feedback (and that’s just a guess, because it felt like more). The chasm between healthcare pros and brand marketing was strenuous, but looking back it at, extremely valuable.
On the one hand, you have team members who are veterans of the healthcare system, who intimately understand audiences and metrics that have historically triggered growth by the product features and benefits, clinical trials and results, analyst backing and other such non-consumer KPI’s — the hard proof.
The brand team was more adept to saying, “But how did they feel? What was the emotional response? And how did they arrive to those conclusions?” Setting the baseline to these questions was just the first step by delivering directions that allowed the brand team to digest and move towards in depth market research, design strategy, and brand affiliation. Intense brand affinity exercises were conducted by a fellow agency, which provided interesting findings which mostly confirmed our intuition.
As an example, a piece of feedback came back on an image of a child that spurred a reaction to affiliating the image to daycare. Was that feedback positive? Was it timely because parents couldn’t put their kids in daycare, or does daycare provide a sentiment of relief that the brand wanted to invoke, as a purveyor of chronic condition support?
Bridging the two worlds of veteran professionals and consumer-centric brand marketers is a process, a long process… that requires evangelists from both sides of the table to deeply transform companies.
Here are some extended brand directions that were embarked on.
Video is Life for Product Marketing
The most celebrated work produced was a product marketing series on Livongo’s programs for Diabetes, Hypertension and Behavioral Health that visualized how Livongo’s products, coaching scenarios, and AI+AI engine could work together to improve the lives of over 328,000 members, as reported in the company’s May 2020 earnings call.
Released at the 2020 national sales conference in Q1, the series received an overwhelming positive response that would be part of the arsenal of sales enablement tools driving 44% growth from Q4 2019 to Q1 2020.
Along with product marketing assets, the agency developed short-form ad creative that would be used in paid social, digital and other mediums where short, concise messaging was key.
Global Initiatives for Livongo
Some of our favorite creative was for global initiatives that saw high visibility inside thought leadership conferences and mass online audiences. At the 2019 HLTH Conference, Livongo presented a distinguished award, She Powers Health, to recognize individuals who are making a significant impact on people’s health, empowering women and modeling diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Women in Leadership was an internal initiative to recognize female leaders inside Livongo for their outstanding efforts. The logo would be the foundation of the entire program. Here are logo directions Silicon Drive created.
Livongo’s Live @ Home initiative celebrated World Health Day, and at the time of shelter-in-place, the CMO of Livongo pulled together an incredible online event partnering with health industry leaders — American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, AMA, and HLTH. The event was pre-recorded and hosted on Youtube Live.
The Road to An $18.5B Acquisition to Teladoc
At these late stages and an acquisition of this magnitude, the road to get there was a collective effort. From the marketing and brand side, it started with giving a formidable sales organization the tools they could get excited about and passionately sell was first and foremost. Moving into various initiatives that allowed Livongo to stay top of mind with leaders in healthcare came naturally and was augmented by thinking deeper about Livongo’s role and delivery of content. It still stands true that timing and a little luck round out these major moments in a company’s journey.
Covid-19 was a strong catalyst for an insane growth trajectory and was able to capture Livongo’s original intent to make it easier for people with chronic conditions to self-manage and avoid challenges in their way to live a healthier life. While the virus has been devastating in so many ways, it has also opened the door for what we’ve always understood about how technology can guide us through a new era of this thing we call, life.
