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.

2019 Grand Jury member Fabiano Oliveira is Creative Director for Saatchi & Saatchi Düsseldorf. He swapped the formative years of his career at McCann Chile on the likes of Coca-Cola and Unilever for the wider realms of Europe. Surviving and indeed transcending the culture shock of leaving Santiago for Moscow, Fabiano then moved on to Bucharest, getting to grips with multi-nationals like Danone and Orangina to soon pass through Spain and eventually arrive in Germany. 

After living and working in six different countries and collecting lots of stories, Fabiano picked Düsseldorf and Saatchi & Saatchi to be his new home. This multi-cultural background together with his restless curiosity made him fluent in expressing an idea and execute it in a fresh and inventive manner.

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

Fabiano Oliveira: The way we talk with our consumers, in general, is change in a huge speed. Not just at the Healthcare and Wellness industry. But we reached a point where if we don’t change the way we connect with our patients we will be obsolete and today you can see a „revolution“ at the healthcare industry where you have more and more campaigns that a more emphatic and have a more patient-centric approach. This “revolution” makes all more interesting because we can use creativity to reimage how can we better connect and deliver meaningful experiences to our patients, engaging with them when and where they need it and be with them alongside throughout their entire journey.

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

Fabiano Oliveira: This is affecting every niche of our industry. Some people are a little sceptical about it, others just embrace it. The Big Data and AI are helping us to pave better ways to build and nurture trust with our patients. They are giving us tools to create a more efficient, precise and compelling experiences to our consumers. It helps us to have more significant insights on every area of the healthcare industry allowing us to create more on target campaigns making the experience more relevant to everyone.

Global Awards: What new trends in healthcare advertising have you seen emerge in the past year?

Fabiano Oliveira: I cannot say this is a new trend, but it is something that have been happening since a while and probably will intensify on the next years. Consumers are more empowered than ever before: And I am not just talking about millennials. Patients in general are evolving faster and they are pushing us to evolve even faster. This is great for everyone. On this evolution you can see that every day online reviews are becoming more important; Dr. Google are still the number one search before a patient attend a doctor and Google are improving they algorithm to better help consumers with their search;  the way patients communicate with us is changing. Now they use chatbots, voice search, wearable devices and so on.

Global Awards: How has advertising in the healthcare wellness sphere evolved in order to be millennial-friendly?

Fabiano Oliveira: Some clients saw this before and manage to evolve faster, but others are just crawling and trying to adjust themselves to a generation that are constantly changing their wants and needs. Today you can see campaigns are putting their focus at the millennial target and they are doing extremely well and others that are trying hard to come up with languages and messages that doesn’t fit precisely to their brand image or to the target. I believe we still need to improve the way we talk with this and the generations to come. We should be creating more and more a constant flow of communication with credible health information to gain the trust of this generation.

Global Awards: What multi-channel techniques are you using to engage on behalf of brands?

Fabiano Oliveira: Just dropping your brand messaging in any channel in a “random way” to reach out your target doesn’t work any longer. Even if there were strategies behind all seemed random. Today the thought on how to reach your patient needs to go deeper and in order to be in as much touch points as needed, we are using precision marketing to create a more meaningful and engage messaging to our brands / clients.  

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?

Fabiano Oliveira: Lucky for me until today I didn’t encounter any health issue with friends and family but there is always something going around which, on my case, it is enough to push me to any area in healthcare. From a simple syrup to new types of cancer treatment. There is always a story to be told, gadgets to be created or a new perspective to be learned.

Global Awards: How about Pharma – has the landscape of Pharma advertising changed in the last few years and where do you see it going moving forward?

Fabiano Oliveira: It had changed and is still evolving. You can see this on the quality of the craft out there which had been lifted.  Perhaps by the talents from other disciplines that are starting to see healthcare with different eyes.  Another point inside Pharma is that we are starting to see more great work coming from all corners of the world. All these details help the business to move forward and further. That is great for everyone.

Global Awards: What creative work on behalf of brands both wellness and/or pharma have you seen recently that are breakthrough in creative and effective?

Fabiano Oliveira: The “Breath of Life” from McCann Shanghai it is one of this works that generate on me a health envy. Perhaps it is because some year back I needed to do this test with a pulmonologist and it has a direct relation with my being or just the fact that delivers easy accessibility, an appropriate use of technology of a device that is in everyone pocket, it is sharable and a service to a community. On top, this is something that didn’t come out of a magician’s hat, instead is based on a real human insight / real world evidence which is universal. And it can work in Brazil or in Spain the same way that worked in China.

Global Awards: This is more of awards and advertising question.  There seems to be varying opinions about the nature of the content awarded top honors at Healthcare Awards show 5-10 years ago, and what tends to win in today’s competitions.  There are some people that believe the bar is being raised, and there are some in the industry that believe the everyday work is getting outshined by causes.  What are your thoughts?

Fabiano Oliveira: The bar is high bit it is high not just for the Healthcare & Wellness part. It is high for everyone no matter the industry we are. From fmgh to cars or from banking to pharma, the bar is being raised. This is great and shows how the business is evolving and adapting itself to what consumers are demanding. We should start to see more and more works that challenge the norm. Our everyday work should be the one driving that change and not feel outshined by causes. Every brand and its products have different business goals but that doesn’t mean we should not try always to come up with the idea that can break the parameters of conventionalism.