Wednesday, July 29, 2009

MayoClinic.com partners with Everyday Health


Wow, this is big. No, this is huge! MayoClinic.com (owned by Mayo Clinic) has partnered with Everyday Health (operated by Waterfront Media). Will this form the ultimate consumer healthcare portal?

You may be wondering, "why this partnership?" I think the answer is rooted in advertising revenues. Consumers are drawn to healthcare ads and many companies are willing to pay quite a bit to target consumers. Sometimes I wonder if people will eventually learn to completely ignore ads. The truth is that certain ads can be very difficult to ignore. What does this do to WebMD? Maybe they should partner with Google.

Here's a snippet from the press release:
Everyday Health, operated by Waterfront Media, will support Mayo Clinic's online advertising efforts through a multi-year relationship. Waterfront Media will represent MayoClinic.com in the following business categories: CPG (consumer packaged goods), OTC (over the counter drugs), retail consumer goods and services, cosmetics, food and beverage, auto, finance, entertainment, technology and media MayoClinic.com will continue to work directly with pharmaceutical advertisers.
Note of clarification from Ginger Plumbo, the publicist for MayoClinic.com:
MayoClinic.com is still owned and operated by Mayo Clinic. We are only working with Everyday Health for advertising representation in certain categories of advertising, but will continue to represent ourselves in the pharmaceutical category. Mayo Clinic will continue to manage MayoClinic.com's content, navigation, and overall management of the site.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Dr. Kim. I'm the publicist for MayoClinic.com and want to clarify that MayoClinic.com is still owned and operated by Mayo Clinic. We are only working with Everyday Health for advertising representation in certain categories of advertising, but will continue to represent ourselves in the pharmaceutical category. Mayo Clinic will continue to manage MayoClinic.com's content, navigation, and overall management of the site. Can you please clarify that for your readers? Any questions, please e-mail me at plumbo.ginger@mayo.edu. Thank you!!

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  2. I don't think this is ground breaking. Looks like Mayo is simply allowing Everyday Health to serve up ads on certain less lucrative topics (that don't warrant direct negotiations with advertisers) on their network. There's no exchange of content. This is a pure ad revenue play.

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