By: Yang Chen
On April 12th, I, the “one day intern”, was rotated to a medical marketing team at Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide.
After the morning’s team meeting, everyone gathered again to discuss an ongoing project involving the launch of a new drug to market. As I looked around the table, it seemed everyone was still waiting for someone to join this meeting. After a few minutes, a man carrying a small piece of luggage entered the conference room. Everyone called him “DDF” (David Davenport-Firth) and he was an expert from the UK Ogilvy team sent to provide strategies for this project.
All the key scientific findings about the new drug were laid out on the white board for us to easily see the big picture. Many of us started to get into the fine details of the findings and discuss how to introduce this new drug into our audience based on these; however, DDF believed it was necessary to understand the significance and impact of this new drug first before getting into too many details. He said that we should imagine ourselves carrying our audience on a journey. During this journey, we need to keep our audience’s attention on the story and decode scientific findings into visualized information for our audience. DDF jumped in front of white board and proclaimed, “It is a great idea to use different colors and animations to attract our audience’s attention, but they should only be used for the most important points, otherwise, it is a waste of ink and will confuse our audience!” For the story of this new drug, our audience is not only health providers, but also patients. It is our job to think from the perspective of both health providers and patients while presenting this new drug, and determine the best way to tell a story that connects them.
The meeting went on for four hours that day. What a long meeting! But I was so lucky to attend this meeting and observe such an enthusiastic storyteller. This experience makes me realize how exciting it is to be a storyteller and to coach others to be as well. A scientist is a person charged with producing scientific data and providing knowledge to others; an artist is a person creating art and providing enjoyment to others; a storyteller is a person combining science and art together to provide both knowledge and enjoyment. Since the age of six, I have loved art and even studied drawing for eight years. However, I have never regretted my choice to become a scientist. Now, I am very excited and look forward to becoming a storyteller to combine these two passions!
To read the first part of this miniseries about the medical writing career, click here