From analog to digital

August 26, 2009 – 8:35 am by Joshua Slatko

Recently Medical Crossfire, a platform that has produced more than a thousand panel discussions on various areas of physician expertise, took the full plunge into the digital age by converting itself into an online video journal at MedicalCrossfire.com. I spoke with Medical Crossfire editor Cheryl Dandrea to find out more about how the company reached this point, what motivated the relaunch, and why marketers might be interested.

Med Ad News: Tell me about the evolution of Medical Crossfire. How did the brand begin, how did it develop, and what motivated the shift into online media?

Cheryl Dandrea: Originally, Medical Crossfire was launched as a journal and live education vehicle for healthcare practitioners. Before the relaunch of Medical Crossfire as an online offering, over 450 programs had been successfully completed in the earlier format. We learned from those 10 years of experience that the format – i.e., the Crossfire-type discussion panel – was more engaging than what physicians were used to. The success of the brand, combined with the shift in the pharmaceutical industry away from live meetings, and the shift in adult learning preferences toward online learning, led to our decision to bring the same quality content that physicians have come to expect from Medical Crossfire directly to their computer screens through MedicalCrossfire.com. And beyond the educational programs, MedicalCrossfire.com offers a complete user-driven environment including tools, resources, and built-in feedback mechanisms that they can access whenever and wherever it is convenient for them.

Med Ad News: It sounds like content production is a new area for Medical Crossfire – that in its previous incarnation the focus was just on putting together panel discussions. Is the “journal” portion of the offering entirely new? How are you producing content for the interactive channels and the educational videos?

Cheryl Dandrea: Actually, we have always produced the medical content of the Medical Crossfire programs. What’s different now is where we host it (online), how it is delivered (ie, in 7- to 10-minute video clips), and the addition of the Web 2.0 components that, in many respects, were absent in the previous format. So in addition to video discussion, we are now offering interactive e-articles, online journal reprints, monographs, podcasts, conference coverage, news/blog, and physician interviews. Our physician channel editors work very closely with our editors to ensure that visitors to MedicalCrossfire.com have access to important, medically relevant, and up-to-date content.

Med Ad News: Could you tell me about how marketers’ brand messages are integrated into the Website and content? What exactly are brand managers getting for their dollar?

Cheryl Dandrea: We have an active and loyal community of 30,000 dedicated members who are extremely engaged with our site, and who are forthcoming with opinions and valuable feedback. Beyond that, when we need to, we can tap into our extended database of over 200,000 healthcare practitioners who we can invite to participate in our programs. With respect to branding messages, our program content is fully independent of any external influences. We develop content with well-recognized and well-respected authorities in their various therapeutic areas. Like in traditional print journals, marketers can choose to purchase advertising space on pages of MedicalCrossfire.com of interest to them to broaden their reach to our program audience. The value of this model to marketers is that we provide advertisers access to viewer metrics so they can tell who viewed what, in addition to the more traditional forms of advertising metrics, such as impressions, conversion rates, clickthroughs, hits, and page views, etc. Additionally, MedicalCrossfire.com has feedback systems worked into all of its programming, the results of which are made available to our advertisers. This information is a potentially huge value when you consider the breadth of opinion and feedback that can be obtained from our viewers.

Tags: Online video, panel discussions, Web 2.0