Case Study: Haymarket Media’s Clinical Advisor

Jim Burke is the VP, Digital Products at Haymarket Media and runs the medical publishing division. He talked with us about the journey from being a print company to embracing curated digital media.

“We are in the process of really transforming our company from a legacy print business to true media company. Video was part of that progression. We knew we couldn’t just send out a journal anymore.”

Clinical Advisor is a closed circulation magazine serving the Physician Assistant and Nurse Practitioner market. But Haymarket knew that Clinical Advisor couldn’t be just a print publication any longer.

“Our readers are consuming content across multiple platforms. It’s print. It’s web. It’s mobile. It’s mobile web. And their expectations across those media platforms are very different. I don’t think you can have a successful website by just posting print content anymore. “

The Challenge for Jim and his team was how to get video content to his readers without expending content creation dollars he didn’t have advertising to support.

“How could you possibly have enough content if you are just getting started. And, is there any value to having one video per week put on your site? We originally looked at trying to shoot our own videos and create some sort of studio. And that ended up being cost prohibitive, so we just really started to find other ways to add video. Content curation really allowed us to gather a lot of videos, and create a really robust channel very very quickly. If we had created a studio it would have taken us months, if not years, to have that really robust channel with a lot of video on it.“

Once they were committed to video curation – they considered a manual process, but quickly determined that wouldn’t scale.

“Our web director knew that we could go in and just add a lot of YouTube content and embed them on to our sites, but that seemed like that would not be an optimum solution, because if the video changed or was taken down, we would never know about it, and that’s where the idea of video curation came in and that’s really how we found Waywire. “

Within three weeks of committing to the Waywire content curation platform, Clinical Advisor was offering visitors access to a vast, and growing collection of high quality curated content.

“All of our journals are always very timely and relevant. But I think when we got into video it really became the best of the web. You don’t have to go out and search through Google, or YouTube, or the other twenty sites that are included, and try to figure out what the best ones are. Our editors, who our readers already trusted to bring them good information, now do that for them on a regular basis.”

What Clinical Advisor knew, was that they needed a product that could deploy quickly, with a robust underlying technology.

“What we were looking for was a simple solution that would really allow us to look across multiple sites. And then once we identified those keywords of those sites that had good content, to be able to save them so we didn’t have to go back to square one over and over again. We talked to a few companies. To be quite honest, Waywire came in very early in the process and was willing to work with us. Their solution for implementation was very easy. “

Chris Bubeck, the Digital Product manager at Haymarket Medical, explains: Anytime we had a question and needed quick response, they’d look into it or they would know the answer right away. So it helped to get everything done quickly. And we had another project where they helped us with designing a specialty resource page….. We were able to show them what we were looking for, and they were able to come back to us with something that fit what we were looking for. So it helped a lot.

The implementation was quick, but what Clinical Advisor really needed was an easy, ongoing video solution that wouldn’t soak up lots of staff editorial or tech resources.

Chris Bubeck explains, “A lot of it [the curation] is automated where it comes to you and you just get an email where it narrows it down to forty videos for you to look at and maybe you pick ten out of them. [Or] if you want to look at a certain subject or something that’s in the news, you can go out and search for that as well, but you can narrow it down a lot right in the beginning. The time our web editor spends, I’d say it is probably a few hours a week. Maybe not quite an hour a day, but something like that. So, I mean, there’s a little work that’s involved with it, but we didn’t have to create a new position or anything like that. “

So, has it worked? The answer is that curated video has moved the needle at Clinical Advisor – and now a number of other Haymarket sites as well.

“We really felt that video was just sort of the next progression and that everybody expects to be able to see a video on a website now. And I think that the metrics that we’re tracking show that video is really providing exactly what we expected. Already Waywire is adding about five to six percent lift on page views. And what we’re finding is that people stay on those pages a little bit longer.”

And now, with more video and more pages, Clinical Advisor is delivering new ad inventory as well.

“Our pharmaceutical advertisers really expect us to have multiple distribution channels for their ad and assets. They do still have print assets. They have banner ads. They also spend a lot of money on assets like video or clinical trials that they have a tendency to put onto the Brand .com website and then they spend a lot of money to drive people to that website. So what they’re looking for now is partners who can actually take that content and put it where their viewers already are. [In addition…] All of the pharmaceutical companies that have major advertising budgets, they have pre‐rolls.” Though those might be considered consumer related, but they all have video assets in some way, shape, or form that they really do want to try to drop into the appropriate websites to have people see how their new drug might work.”

And video is growing the Clinical Advisor community as well says Jim Burke:

“What we found is that we were able to have people come to the website because of the videos. We are just trying to take those logical steps to grow our digital business. My plan for the Medical Journals would be that early next year, we would have Waywire curated content on all of the sites.”