Healthcare technology company Verily Health has kicked off its first major national campaign, the latest step in a mission to help millions make sense of their health with its free AI-driven app, Verily Me.
Verily Me launched last October and emerged from beta mode in February, and works by offering access to speedy, accurate health insights by connecting users to licensed clinicians who can provide health recommendations based on their medical records.
To spread the word, the company linked up with ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s New York arm to create its “Make it Make Sense” campaign. The concept was based on the notion that health management can be complex, especially for patients with multiple health conditions, and ensuring that clinicians and specialists have all of the needed information on hand “can be really tricky,” Verily’s chief marketing officer, Alix Hart, explained in a recent interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
This, Hart said, is “core to defining what Verily Me is all about.”
With a simplified way to manage all of a patient’s available health history, healthcare practitioners could narrow some gaps in care that may not be as apparent when health data is scattered across different apps and webpages, Hart explained. On the patient side, Verily Me offers a way to water down complex medical jargon and more easily coordinate care, or in other words, “Make it Make Sense.”
Verily hopes to introduce itself to a wider audience who could potentially benefit from the app through its spots distributed across national TV, audio and social channels. The first two ads that have run so far, called “A Case of the Umms” and “Medical Term Soup,” look to reach people who may have multiple symptoms and challenges with managing their health care, Hart said.
Some of the app’s features that the ads highlight is Violet, Verily Me’s “AI companion,” which is available 24/7 to help patients navigate their healthcare questions. The app also now offers a symptom check assessment, which offers a “safe and private space” to enter symptoms. As Verily is “a care company as well as a technology company,” ensuring that users have a trusted space to ask important health questions was crucial to the mission, Hart said.
“Medical Term Soup” features a man peering into his bowl of alphabet soup upon being asked how his doctor’s visit went, watching the letters scramble into complex medical terms before answering in gibberish of his own.
His Verily Me app quickly pings to explain the real results of his lab work in simpler terms: “Your results show your blood glucose was out of range,” the man reads out loud from a chat with the app’s Violet AI. Violet recommends lifestyle changes to help him get on track, which seems to put him at ease.
The other 30-second spot, called “Case of the Umms,” sees a man celebrating his 45th birthday. While chatting with some of the party-goers, one of them asks if he’s done “the thing yet,” to which the birthday boy responds with a long, drawn-out “ummm…”.
A Verily Me health update breaks up the awkward moment, alerting the man that he has, in fact, “did that thing," which is revealed to be a colonoscopy screening. A voiceover explains that the app gives users personalized preventative recommendations that “umm, help you make sense of your care.”
Hart has been “really encouraged” by the growth the app has seen since launching the campaign, she said, as the team has been “definitely seeing the impact” with “really healthy engagement.“ Still, there’s still more to come for Verily’s marketing push, Hart said.
Verily’s campaign comes shortly after the company split off from Alphabet in March, transitioning to its own corporation, more than ten years after its 2015 inception as a moonshot of Google X.
After a $300 million funding round led by Series X Capital, Alphabet let go of its controlling stake in the company, becoming a minority investor instead. UCHealth and the University of Colorado Anschutz also supported the funding round, which will be used to “accelerate our AI roadmap,” CEO Stephen Gillett explained at the time.