Each year, the Global Awards recruits some of the world’s most prominent award-winning industry creatives and thought leaders to serve on the Global Awards Grand Jury. Laura Smith is a Group Creative Director HEAT / Deloitte. With award-winning experience across industries, Laura has brought this unique perspective to Heat. Her work has specialized in the development of brands, campaigns, product launches and product development – truly holistic engagements that push boundaries. And with deep roots in health and wellness, she is passionate about partnering with strategy to build compelling and meaningful experiences that drive behavior change and ultimately better outcomes - making health and care work hand in hand. 

Global Awards: How have empowered and informed patients changed the way Healthcare & Wellness brands connect with the consumer?

Laura Smith: By understanding that patients are more empowered and informed than ever, brands have the opportunity to have smarter conversations that truly give consumers a seat at the table; giving patients a greater sense of control – permission to ask questions, and to be an advocate for themselves as well as others. For brands, an empowered, informed audience provides opportunities to understand consumers with more depth and empathy that can help marketing be more relatable and authentic, and ensures that every brand touchpoint has value. At the same time, being ‘empowered and informed’ puts an added responsibility on patients that we, as creators of tools and proponents of better content to inform them, need to be super mindful of.

Global Awards: How has big data and AI helped advertisers hit the target for brands?

Laura Smith: Personalization, personalization, personalization. Just as medicine and science is successfully evolving to become more personal, we marketers need to continue to mimic and move in that same direction. We need to create experiences and messaging that understands individuals’ behaviors – in the tone, manner and medium that will motivate and inspire them to take charge. Listening to the consumers has long been a successful way of addressing personalization. But big data and AI allow us to immerse ourselves in a far vaster and more precise landscape with unprecedented insights that in turn allow us to create unique, finely tuned and truly tailored work that is more effective.

Global Awards: As you make your way through life, you encounter inevitable health issues with friends and family. Are there any diseases, issues, conditions that you have a yearning to work on? Why?

Laura Smith: This might sound like one of the more mundane aspects of health but I’d say clinical trials. I see it as a facet that could get a real boost from an influx of communication strategy, technology and data. First by deeply understanding the experience from all sides and then by finding a way to create tools and resources to make it not only more efficient but more effective. How can we as marketers help evolve the clinical trial experience, from acquisition through onboarding to retention and reporting? Can we find ways for technology to give us the power to improve targeting, discover new audiences, and eliminate waste? It’s a challenge that is close to my heart; at Heat and Deloitte Digital we are beginning to scratch the surface and it’s pretty exciting to start to see what impact it could have. This could really be an area that breaks through with the use of data and AI – stay tuned!