There's one thing John McCain and Barack Obama agreed on during their presidential campaigns: Health Care Reform. Partisan politics aside, they both agreed that the US healthcare industry was losing money and losing ground by being slow to adopt digital technology.

Multiple companies, including Microsoft, have developed products intended to take medical files online so that they may be securely accessed from anywhere immediately. The benefits — and risks — of such technology are obvious.

But that's internal stuff. What about marketing? What about networking patients who have been served by your hospital?

James Heywood is the cofounder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe.com. Think of it as a Facebook for patients who form social networks around common diagnoses and illnesses instead of interests. Here, people share insights about medication side effects, new treatments, and, yes, the quality of the various treatment facilities they've been too. Heywood thinks, even with the tight security around healthcare and medical records in this country, people are nevertheless gravitating towards online communities where they can openly share with people with similar interests or experiences.

Another new product, called HealthVault, enables people to store their medical records online, where they can be securely accessed by doctors and hospitals, and even synched with meidcal devices like heart-rate monitors and weight scales. The movement to get our healthcare system into the digital age is clearly underway, and it's mostly coming from outside the healthcare world.

There's an enormous potential here for hospitals and other healthcare facilities. Most healthcare marketing tends to stick to mainstream media, but comsumers clearly want interactive options as well.

Imagine creating for your healthcare facility an intranet where inpatients can talk to each other about their doctors, nurses, experiences, even post status updates for loved ones to follow who are too far away to visit. Or imagine a place on your hospital's website where area residents can upload their medical information to your hospital's system in case they're ever rushed there in an emergency and want their medical history to go before them.

This is the kind of digital world we're entering. Consumers, clients, and now patients want communities that connect them with eachother and with information, and if hospitals, clinics and private practices don't work with their marketing teams to come up with these solutions on their own, someone else will do it for them.

Incidentally, Meyer&Wallis is chalk-full of progressive healthcare marketing ideas. Perhaps we should talk?

There's a great article over at Barbara Farfan's Retail Blog about the different responses retailers are putting forth during this shaky economic environment. While many businesses are posting losses, several are still making money. And they think they know the secret to staying profitable: keep making and marketing fantastic products.

For example, accessories manufacturer Coach Inc. made more than they expected to last quarter. A bit of quick research revealed that the reason may be because consumers believed in the quality and uniqueness of the products they were offering. So for this holiday season, Coach Inc. is rolling out virtually every product in their development pipeline in the hopes that their consumers will continue to be "dazzled" and presented with products they're willing to buy.

Several of our own clients have expressed trepidation about the current economy. And with good reason! But I'll say here what our president and CEO have been telling them: Even in this economic downturn, people will continue to respond to advertising, and, per usual, the advertiser with the most unique message will stand out. The thing is that, in the coming months, most advertisers will get very conservative with their advertising, not to mention their product development and deployment. But in doing so, their brand will fade into the consumer's background, almost encouraging the reduced spending they fear. The advertisers who continue to find ways to stay in front of their consumers during this economy will not only reap modest benefits now, but huge benefits later on when the economy begins to recover and their brand is already top-of-mind.

Read Barbara's article here.

This probably goes without saying, but a lot has changed in the advertising world in the last decade or so, and most of these changes have been brought about by technology.

When I was a kid, I used to come into this office (my dad has worked here for a while) to play with the art markers. At that young age, seeing a sea of dozens of different, vibrant colors in each of the art director's offices was almost mind numbing. I'd find a free desk and challenge myself to use as many colors as I could in one drawing.

I can also remember hearing the gentle whir and not-so-gentle clackity-clack of IBM Selectric typewriters. But they were mostly for the accountants and secretaries; the writers scribbled out their ideas longhand.

Today at Meyer&Wallis, we still have a set of art markers. I've seen them used twice in my tenure here. And our last Selectric died about two years ago. It sits in the copy room with a note taped to it that half-seriously suggests we should have it gilded or stuffed, lest we forget where we've come from.

Like virtually every other industry, advertising has been transformed by technology. Tasks formerly done by hand are now more quickly and elegantly tackled with a computer. Where we used to send out a physical monthly newsletter, we now have our website, and this blog. And some assignments — like banner ads or web pages — can only be done with the aid of a computer.

But there's something about Meyer & Wallis' long history that sets us apart from newer shops. Read any book on advertising (such as Luke Sullivan's excellent Hey Whipple, Squeeze This), and you'll see that while there's an art to writing creative ads that can be learned at school (or in a book), there's a science to writing creative ads that work that only comes with experience. And when it comes to experience, Meyer & Wallis has more than we know what to do with. Literally. Every time we've moved offices, we've had to throw out part of our archive of past work. Because after more than 40 years of doing this, we just don't have room to keep copies of all the great work we've done. Having been around for more than 40 years (and having several current employees who've been with us for decades — a couple at least 35 years) gives us a foundation of experience no digital startup can touch.

And while so much has changed, a lot has stayed the same. Namely, people are still people, and the things that grab our attention, make us think and challenge us to try something different are all the same. This is where Meyer & Wallis shines. Now only have we developed proprietary research methods for pinpointing what consumers currently think/need to think about your brand, but even our "gut instincts" have gotten uncannily accurate after a few decades.

So it's been a long time since we've used those art markers for any production work. It's also been a long time since we've engineered a campaign for a client that wasn't a complete success. That's what experience can do for an agency that even the freshest, fanciest digital technology can't. That's not to say we don't do digital. Our recent interactive campaign for a display of Roman art from the Lourve at the Indianapolis Museum of Art helped draw the largest crowds in their 125-year history.

That's the standard of excellence we set for ourselves, no matter the media, no matter the client.

Incedentally, Meyer & Wallis is now kind of a best-of-both-worlds kind of place. With our vast experience with traditional media, even our media buying strategy is light years ahead of anyone else (probably because we have relationships with all the local television and radio stations that date back to, well, when they became stations). We can get more bang for your media buck than anyone else. Period. And our UK style account planning puts proprietary market research and insight behind your brand strategy in a way your current Account Executive might not even understand. But we also happen to have one of the most progressive, strategically grounded interactive departments around. There are things we're implementing digitally in the coming months that we think we might be the first to do, so I can't even tell you about them. Yet.

It's not a perfect marriage of old and new here, though. Creative Director Tom Dixon still prefers to scribble his ideas on a pad of paper. And his iMac? Usually playing a steady stream of Johnny Cash in the background.

It may not be a perfect marriage, but at least it's a civil union.

Meyer&Wallis is a Milwaukee ad agency. It's also an Indianapolis ad agency. Since 1990, we've operated two offices, allowing us to serve clients from a wider area.

But with one office in Milwaukee and another in Indianapolis, how do you suppose Meyer & Wallis continues to move forward as one company, sharing talents, ideas and responsibilities?

Technology, you might say. And it's true. I have a video conference at least once a week with one of my coworkers in Indianapolis. He and I can easily work on the same project because we have access to the same file servers in each office via a dedicated, high-speed connection. We also have an agency wide conference call every Monday morning to talk about open jobs, work coming down the pipeline, and the latest Colts-Packers match-up. Well, that was just this Monday. But did you see that game?!?

So while we're separated geographically by 275 miles of Midwest earth, we're able to work quite closely as one team dedicated to your brand.

But this doesn't set us apart from anyone. Any agency with multiple offices that can't videoconference and share files between them these days probably has bigger things to worry about (like whether there's a fresh ribbon in the secretary's typewriter or if the president's dictaphone has recently been oiled).

No, what I think sets Meyer & Wallis apart is that, even with all this technology at our disposal, there's usually at least one of us — if not three or four — driving between Milwaukee and Indianapolis each week. Why? To make a delivery? No. FedEx does that. Super-important meetings? Not really — we have important meetings all the time over the phone. I think we just really like connecting with each other. Advertising is about making connections: between your company's goals and your brand's development, between your brand and consumers, and, most recently, amongst consumers via interactive media, where many of them connect about your brand via social networking and blogging. Connecting is what makes an ad a compelling message, and our passion for helping you connect with your customers is matched only by our collaborative desire to connect with each other.

Know that with Meyer & Wallis as your advertising agency, you have at your disposal a group of people who love making connections. If we'll regularly drive 275 miles just to stay in sync with each other, imagine the lengths we'll go to for your brand. (Or call and ask. We'd gladly share some success stories.)

If I didn't see that coworker from Indy that I work closely with in person at least once every other week, it wouldn't be normal. And if I don't, I can only assume the perpetual construction in Chicago must be especially bad, or the Colts got spanked by the Packers again. Did you see that game?!?

Starting next month, Samsung is going to begin shipping its mobile phones with an application called ScanLife preinstalled. This is a product made by a company called Scanbuy, and allows a user with a simple digital camera — like those in mobile phones — to read a special barcode. Similar technologies have been explored in Japan and other parts of Asia for about a year. I think even Google has been trying to push its own version of something like this. Now, it looks like the tech is finally getting large-scale support stateside.

There was a curious article in the New York Times this week. The journalist was writing out of honest confusion. He had heard that AOL was adding some new features to its home page, and wanted to ask his readers if any of them cared. Even a little bit.

See, this world we call “interactive media” is a funny place where empires rise and fall with the predictability of the seasons. There was a time when America Online was called the “goliath among Internet service providers.” Admitting you weren’t on AOL was like admitting you didn’t have indoor plumbing. AOL’s base of almost 30 million dial-up users made their service synonymous with “the Internet” for the better part of the 1990s.

But even though AOL was a kind of perfect solution to the WEB 1.0 world, it fell flat on its face as newer alternatives were brought to market. All of a sudden, internet users didn’t want online hand holding. They wanted freedom, options, media, and speed. Oh, how they wanted speed. Now, in this world of broadband access and wireless hotspots, the AOL many of us depended on for internet access is basically obsolete. Obsolete?!? How did this happen?

What AOL was among the last to appreciate is that, unlike print or broadcast, interactive media has yet to develop any sense of heritage. Small innovations aside, a book is still a book and a 30-minute sitcom is still a 30-minute sitcom. But we love interactive media for what it can do today that it couldn’t do yesterday, and we have little patience for it when it doesn’t evolve fast enough.

Anyway, the author of the article in question did get a handful of replies from people who still use AOL. Predictably, they were mostly baby boomers who only use the internet to check their email and use their cell phones “for phone calls and nothing more.” Like AOL, this kind of internet user probably won’t exist in a generation. And, for that matter, neither will the internet as we know and love it today.

With all that said, I should probably mention that Meyer & Wallis’ interactive team spends a lot of time each day playing with and discussing the emerging interactive technologies you won’t even know about until next year. Our commitment to our clients is to understand this stuff better than anyone, and to understand it in the greater context of a comprehensive creative marketing strategy across all possible media. You owe it to your customers to stay current on the means available to you to interact with consumers. Like never before, they expect this of you, and see it as a measure of your company’s relevance to them. If you last looked at your company's website before FaceBook and YouTube existed (only a couple years ago), chances are it's collecting some virtual dust. Don’t believe me? Don't know what FaceBook is? Hey – you aren’t reading this on AOL, are you?

Read the NY Times article here.

    The podcast turns 4 this month, and over the last few years, we’ve seen a sharp increase in the number of people who download Podcasts. Podcasting is a relatively new technology in the world of digital media, allowing anyone from individuals in their mother’s basement to big movie studios to post an audio or video file to the internet in such a way that it is automatically downloaded by those who “subscribe” to that podcast. Now perhaps that lengthly explanation wasn't necessary, but, like I said, this is relatively new technology. Only four years ago this month, the word “podcast” had yet to be uttered. Today, about 19% of internet users have downloaded a podcast to enjoy it later, and they have literally thousands to choose from. While 19% may not seem very impressive, it's likely to keep going up and up as the medium gains momentum. What does this mean for your business?

    Whether you're a hospital looking to rise above the sea of healthcare marketing going on around you, or a retailer wondering how to make use of interactive media in your retail marketing, or the guardian of an aging brand wondering how to reach out to a younger generation with your brand strategy, podcasting might be for you.

    It just so happens I'm listening to a podcast right now. There's a show on NPR I'm never around a radio to hear live, but that I can download as a podcast. Not only has this allowed me to enjoy this programming I'd otherwise miss, but it has led me to audition some other NPR programming as well, exposing me to their sponsoring companies, even to consider making a donation!

    Think of the other great ways to engage potential customers with this medium. You could feature company news or new products in a weekly or monthly podcast. Talk about exciting new hires or technologies at your hospital. Does your product really shine when it's in use? Produce a video podcast showing your ingredient being cooked with, your product being tested for durability, your product being used in innovative ways, or how it compares to the competition. A podcast is also a great way to create a "culture" around your brand. For example, you might be a beverage manufacturer, which has nothing to do with music, but you know your customer base tends to like a certain kind of music. Produce a weekly podcast featuring up-and-coming artists you think your customers should know about. They'd soon come to see your brand as "in touch" with who they are, helping you stay top-of-mind for sure.

    These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. But at Meyer & Wallis, that's NEVER how we actually do advertising. Our creative marketing strategies are grounded in what we believe to be the best research and planning in the industry. And with new media like podcasting, it's still possible to do something no marketer has done before. Imagine what a "first" like that could do for a brand. We do. All the time.

    So, remember the iPhone? The gadget that few of us need but almost all of us want? Especially in the just-released 3G version, mobile “extras” like web browsing and email support are better integrated and more robust than on any other device.

    It is into this market that New York upstart Peek thinks they can throw a new winner. Their about-to-be-released mobile device has a nice, bright screen, full QWERTY keyboard, and is easy to set up with virtually any email carrier. And... that’s it. No web. No voicemail. No voice, in fact—it’s not a phone. It's just a wireless email reader.

    Now, I would have guessed that, back in the day, when the light bulb was introduced, natural gas and kerosene lamp suppliers immediately understood that their days were numbered and hoped to find some kind of niche market where their products could survive. But, in fact, the opposite happened. They refined their products and introduced new features, hoping to compete with the newer, superior technology. Of course, it didn’t work. And neither will the Peep.

    Objectively, the Peep is probably a solid little device, that does what it claims better than most consumer mobile phones with limited data capabilities. But the problem is so do BlackBerrys, smartphones and iPhones, only they do more. If there is any market left for a wireless device that only checks email, it can only get smaller. (Those of you who still have a pager may disagree.)

    At Meyer & Wallis, we believe many unsuccessful products are actually decent products that are poorly marketed. Peep needed a brand strategy that introduced them in a way that didn't compete with smartphones, since that's not what they are. A better brand strategy would have been to find a NEW market whose need they could meet. But, with their current retail marketing strategy, this may well be the first and last you hear of Peep.