The April issue countdown begins

January 14, 2009 – 12:59 pm by Steven Niles

Med Ad News kicked off preparations for this year’s April issue with a meeting of healthcare advertising executives in New York City. Dubbed The Agency Issue, our April magazine features profiles of any agency with at least 75% of its business in the healthcare field. The list seems to grow every year as new names emerge, and in our effort to create the most comprehensive reference guide to healthcare advertising agencies, the book just keeps getting bigger. (The 2008 issue was a hefty 2 pounds, 11.9 ounces. I weighed it.)

In conjunction with The Agency Issue, we also hold the annual Manny Awards, a gala event that for the past several years has been held at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers. And we’ll be there again this year, on Wednesday, April 22, 2009, to celebrate the 20th Annual Manny Awards.

We know how much these awards mean to the agencies we honor, so it’s important to us to keep them as relevant and reflective of the industry as possible. That’s why we like to get together every few years with a cross section of top executives to talk about the awards and possible adjustments that might be worth making.

For our 2008 meeting, Steven Michaelson was gracious enough to offer up space at the lovely Wishbone offices in New York. More than 30 execs attended, and the conversation was lively. Med Ad News’ Senior Group Publisher Patty Spinner and Editor In Chief Chris Truelove got the ball rolling, but it didn’t take much to ignite the barrage of opinions that flew around that table.

And it was great! We gathered invaluable insight into how the awards are received, appreciated, and yes, sometimes questioned. One thing was certainly clear, and that is with so many diverse perspectives, there would never be a universal consensus on anything.

After the meeting, Patty fielded a ton of follow-up emails from attendees and others who couldn’t make the meeting. Then, the editorial staff at Med Ad News took everything we had learned during and after the event, sat down in our conference room, and worked out what the Manny Awards are going to look like in their 20th year.

The number one thing we took away from all the discussions is that the Manny Awards have a very special position among the variety of awards programs designed to honor healthcare advertising. And that is the fact that the Manny Awards are about the agencies. As such, we should recognize them not just for their work and creativity (which are still of utmost importance), but also for their people, their spirit, and their culture.

Thus, we have come up with some interesting new awards categories and made tweaks to some of the old ones. For example, whereas in the past we awarded a Best Professional Ad, we will now present an award for Best Professional Campaign, with the idea that a campaign is more reflective of an agency’s overall creative vision and capabilities. The voting for the Most Creative Agency award will also provide, via online galleries, an opportunity to judge agencies not just on reputation but on a representative sample of their body of work.

What do these changes mean for us? Well, for our Web team, some long days and nights trying to get all these Web galleries up and running. And for the editorial staff, it means the added stress and confusion of coordinating an even greater influx of submission materials. But we’re confident it can be done, and in the long run, it will make for an even stronger Manny Awards and April issue.

It all comes down to creating the most valuable product for the clients: the pharmaceutical marketers who turn to this issue and these awards as a guide for where to place their accounts in the coming year. In the current business climate, those choices are all the more critical. Mistakes are costly. Money is tight. Pharma companies need to know where they will get the most value for their dollar. Anything we can do to help add certainty to that decision is worth it for us and, hopefully, for the agencies we partner with in creating this issue.

Finally, I just wanted to note that you can relive last year’s awards on YouTube. Here’s a small sample:

Tags: April issue, healthcare advertising, Magazine production, Manny Awards, Med Ad News