Jim Weiss: Human-Centric Health Stories

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I am Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to this episode of the FoST Podcast. Everyone has a unique story about how whether you’re dealing with your own wellbeing, with the care of a loved one or with a global crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare affects us all. So we’re extremely lucky to be alive today in an era where incredible advancements in modern medicine are truly extending and saving people’s lives. But somehow the messaging that comes from the biopharmaceutical companies is often difficult to understand, overwhelming and even scary. Our guest today, Jim Weiss, is one of the foremost experts in health industry communications. He founded Real Chemistry as in one person consultancy in 2001, and has since built it into one of the largest PR firms by revenue in the country. With over 2000 employees, real Chemistry combines data-driven insights with human-centric storytelling to help biopharmaceutical companies reach audiences in a way that’s authentic and easy to understand. Their mission is to transform healthcare from what it is, something that’s often confusing and disempowering for patients into what it should be, a more connected, trustworthy, and altogether human experience. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to sit down with Jim today to hear some of his wisdom on storytelling in the health arena. Please join me in welcoming Jim Weiss.

 

Jim, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast.

Jim Weiss:

Thanks for having me, Charlie. It’s always fun to talk to you.

Charlie Melcher:

Absolutely. Looking forward to it. So Jim, you started your company Real Chemistry over 20 years ago now, and very quickly decided to focus on health and communications for the health industry. Why did you choose that as an area to focus on?

Jim Weiss:

Just by way of history in my own life, I graduated from Newhouse. I had a communications degree, was broad. I went to one of the big firms at the time, hill and Nolton, and I probably thought, oh, I’ll interview and I’ll get jobs promoting the Rolling Stones and music and all that stuff. And it turned out that my first gig was working on Metamucil and Pepto-Bismol. So I always say that I started at the bottom in the most literal sense and worked my way up, but I didn’t know healthcare communications was a thing. It was actually at the dawn of it. It was the late eighties in New York, and it was really the beginnings of communications around that. Now of course there’s ads on television all the time talking about drugs, but at that time it was not a discipline or an area that really was as fully baked as it is today. So I think you know how things are, it’s better to be lucky than smart. I ended up kind of stumbling into the space and just stuck around in it.

Charlie Melcher:

You’ve been helping companies tell stories, pr, comms, marketing, ultimately, those are really about figuring out how to tell an important story. What is your insight or learnings about storytelling for companies in the healthcare space?

Jim Weiss:

I think one of the things you find in working in healthcare and life sciences is most of these companies are founded or run by scientists, and scientists are not by training communicators. And what I like to tell people today is that leadership is communications and communications is leadership. But in life’s sciences, that isn’t exactly always how it works because it’s really the guy or the gal who really knows the science or invented the science. So he or she who invented it lead it. Now that evolves as you move into commercialization and some of the things that I work in, and you do find experts that do that, but it is one of the reasons I left the in-house world and created a consultancy was because I was inside as a communicator and a marketer, and I didn’t really feel that was the path to CEO. So I was thinking, if I want to be one, I’m going to have to go make my own way.

Charlie Melcher:

And you certainly did. I mean, it’s incredibly impressive what you’ve built. It’s one of the dominant firms in the space. And is there a secret to that? How was it that you were able to build such a big business in this space? Well,

Jim Weiss:

I think the secret to growth in any way or shape or form, everyone will tell you, even though we’re in the age of artificial intelligence, and that’s a big part of our positioning in the market, it’s people. People drive it all. And someone told me this, you’ll change or evolve or define your culture by who you hire. And that has proven true again and again and again. So ultimately the secret is really that, and then how you connect the dots in that work. I also look at relationship with clients a network. It’s not what you know, but who, and that is for real. If you don’t know anyone and you can’t get that knowledge to people, then it’s also less valuable potentially.

Charlie Melcher:

So what are some of the unique challenges of helping companies in your space tell their stories?

Jim Weiss:

Talking to you earlier about the fact that a lot of the companies we work with are founded by, are run by scientists, and to help them translate what is typically very difficult, complicated science that they fully understand. To make that clear to the average person, you need to contextualize it. And in the case of certain audiences, how big is the market? What are we trying to fix here? Why is this better than the other thing? And we are moving into an exciting new area versus where we used to be of real cures, real solutions to disease that we absolutely never have. We’ve also been able to address diseases we were never able to address because of the knowledge around the human genome, which is probably the biggest breakthrough. Most people don’t deal with health or disease or any of that unless it hits them either personally or with someone they know and love. And even then it’s super hard to understand.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s so interesting because you’re dealing with issues that are literally life and death, but to make it relatable so people can understand, to be able to, as you say, translate something that’s very complicated. There’s that challenge of how do you make it human? How do you translate into a language that everyone understands?

Jim Weiss:

So a lot of times when you communicate, you do that through humor and fun, and you just talked about the life and death nature of that. So how can you be fun or funny about cancer or certain severe heart diseases, et cetera. So you can see the tone generally out. There is one tone and it’s quite monotone. On occasion, you see something quirky and interesting, and that’s probably related to things like diabetes or weight loss that are probably more consumer oriented, I’d say really depends on what we’re promoting. Look, when I was at Genentech growing up there, our CEO and senior leader said, you can’t use advertising. You’ve got to come up with another way to do this. The science has to sell the story. That was always their feelings. We were science led and impact driven. So a lot of the work focused on work with advocacy groups and patient groups and helping them access the medicine, understand the science behind the medicine, access physicians.

 

So we created relationships with a lot of the third parties. I can tell you in the case of cystic fibrosis, I worked on Pulmazyme, which was the first new drug launched for CF In 30 years, it’s become the basis of extension of life expectancy in that field. And really, what were you going to do? There were only 30,000 some patients, so you’re not going to put Super Bowl ads on. That wouldn’t be a way to reach them. So it becomes more targeted, but you’ve got to reach them. So a lot of times that is through third party partnership and digital and online targeting, which is sort of how my business evolved to where it did in the case of my wife, for example, who’s going through cancer. We talk about preventing recurrence and could you design vaccines that would ultimately prevent that cancer from coming back? And you can design it down to the very minute molecular characteristic. I mean, that is really getting true

Charlie Melcher:

Now. And personalized is coming too, right? Yeah,

Jim Weiss:

Super personalized. Exactly.

Charlie Melcher:

You talked about having to create stories that are really based on the science, on the success, the impact. And I wonder if some of that comes from the tradition, the sort of old days of storytelling around and marketing around cures. It comes out of a tradition of snake oil salesmen and disinformation way back in the day, pro-regulation where there was a lot of lack of trust or a lot of people selling things that didn’t live up to their promises. I imagine that that’s impacted the way people think about telling the stories and marketing drugs and different types of services now because they need to make sure that it’s based in not just the real science, but in real trust.

Jim Weiss:

Well, trust is everything in any business, in any situation. But I think when you’re thinking about the doctor patient relationship and is this drug you’re prescribing me going to help me or is it going to make me feel worse? And a lot of the drugs we work in actually do make a patient feel worse relative to what it might be doing. And in more of the invisible preventive worlds of high blood pressure and cholesterol lowering and some of these other things, you don’t really feel it. You don’t really see it, but maybe you do experience side effects or other problems. So what person’s going to read the fine print in the prescribing information, which is so long and so drawn out and legally written, most average patients can’t understand it anyway. So you have to trust your doctor or your caregiver. So our jobs, I think they’re doubly hard because you’ve got to put all that cautionary language in there.

 

People don’t know how to contextualize that. So I think that’s one of the tricks of our trade that we make sure when we’re creating communication and storytelling in the space we’re in, we try to partner with experts that are trustworthy, that people do have some experience with. I almost feel like you can never go out and just communicate one way anymore. It’s always a bit of a dialogue. And that’s what we spend a lot of time on. When a patient calls the company and has a conversation with a medical affairs liaison, what is the Q and a? What’s that script about? So it’s less storytelling in my view than I think it’s consultative information sharing. We’re not selling the same thing here that everybody else might be selling. This is a complex, multifaceted, hard to understand area and highly regulated. Not to mention that where a lot of laws and regulations tell you how to tell the story.

Charlie Melcher:

You once said to me, Jim, that you thought that advertising in pharma, you sort of hated it. Why do you say that?

Jim Weiss:

I mean, I hate maybe the circumstances more than I hate it. Plus I don’t know how truly informative all the ads are to the average consumer. And that’s hard to do in 30 seconds and 60 seconds. And I would say it’s actually amazing what we do accomplish. But what I don’t love about it is what I’ve been saying is that it’s really hard to tell a full story with the interruption of all the side effects and all the other elements that one has to put in. And I think those regulations were made, those advertising regulations were made 20, 30 years ago. And I think they need to be revisited and we need to get some change in how we can present that. But instead for now, it’s all this bare balance that is still in the ad and it takes up so much real estate that you don’t really have the time to tell the fullest patient story that we’re trying to tell in the most compelling way. I’d say for the most part, we’re kind of forced into a little box that in my view, needs to be revisited so we can be more creative and more provocative and more effective and impactful than we are now.

Charlie Melcher:

And what’s one of the creative solutions that you’ve worked with over the years to get around the dullness of some of these?

Jim Weiss:

Well, I think my big one we’ve talked about it is disease awareness. I think if you can move into that space now, this is a lot easier when you’re the only drug or game in town or one of two when we know most of these drugs, it’s crowded spaces. But I have a division called Star Power that connects, it’s not always celebrities, it’s of all types to brands. The universal sort of truth is we all get sick, whatever that is. And the philosophy here is how do you humanize, put a face on it? Well, how do we really relate to the world today? It’s always around influencers and celebrity more nine times out of 10. So we did something more recently that’s still out there and worked with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on an ad campaign for the problem of AFib. And it’s so common and it’s particularly common in older people, and therefore causes a high risk in stroke. So he seemed to be a really good example of somebody who was flourishing and vital and relatable to a wide audience.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s take a listen to a clip from that campaign.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

I’m Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. My main focus was to be the best I could be on the basketball court. The first inkling that something was wrong was I started to notice that I couldn’t do things without losing my breath. I still didn’t think that it was anything serious until I couldn’t make it through the airport every 20 or 30 yards. I had to sit down and get my breath. Every physical exertion seemed to exhaust me. I knew something was wrong. And then I went to a baseball game with some friends and I couldn’t deal with any exertion. And finally I went from the baseball game to the hospital where I was diagnosed with AFib. When I first noticed symptoms, I should have gone to the doctor and told them what was happening. Instead, I tried to let it pass. It took me listening to the cardiologist to help me get it straight as to what I needed to do.

Jim Weiss:

So you could get a lot just from his presence without even having to say anything. And that’s where a celebrity in my view becomes the most valuable because you get a super credible, super believable, trustworthy guy. So it just seemed like a hit the target moment, and I think we had a very impactful, successful campaign.

Charlie Melcher:

How do you feel about this movement to individuals having to take ownership of their own healthcare? It used to be we all just trust our doctor. We had one doctor we went to see, it was generally a hymn. We went to see him and we just took whatever he said as gospel. And now, right, everybody’s online, everybody’s doing their own research. Everyone’s just as likely to turn to their social network for advice as they are to their primary care physician. Is that a good thing or that a bad thing?

Jim Weiss:

My view is, of course, it’s a good thing if you keep it all in context. So multi-source confirmation is really important. You shouldn’t just take it from one source. So if the internet tells you something and your doctor confirms it or your doctor says something and the internet confirms it and then a pharmacist confirms it and another third party patient group or a resource confirms it, you can feel a level of confidence. But here’s one thing I know for sure. If you eat too much, you drink too much, you weigh too much. All those are massive risk factors. And when I listen to the FDA commissioner almost every time he speaks now, Rob Kaf, who I’ve done some work with in the past, prevention is really the pound of cure. When we really think about all of this, like we are a society focused on treatment, not prevention, and we’re treating disease rather than preventing it. Prevention through diet, exercise, preventive medicine, early screening and detection, all this stuff will save us billions and billions of dollars and a lot of pain and suffering. But you know, that ain’t really how we think and work, right? People still unbelievably smoke when we know it absolutely proven leads to COPD and cancer and other diseases people drink, even though there’s a clear correlation between those things and cancer and heart disease. I mean, I could go on and on. So I think it’s absolutely a good thing as long as what they’re reading isn’t crazy.

Charlie Melcher:

Jim, how has being deep inside pharma and healthcare changed the way you approach and feel about your own health and the way you talk about it for you and your family?

Jim Weiss:

Oh, sure. I mean, I think I’ve got an inside track because of where I’ve worked, and I can’t say that it’s true for everybody, but given I spend a lot of time putting that out there in the public domain, it’s kind of hard not to follow what you preach. But certainly in the case of my own AFib that I had diagnosed last year and my wife’s situation with gastric cancer, the fact that we knew what we were doing and knew how to navigate, but it’s still difficult to engage with the health system, but we just know the questions to ask. We just know what the next question is. When you’re sitting in a room, your head is clouded with a lot of questions and fear and concern. But if you’re armed with experience around it, I mean, how can that hurt? It doesn’t hurt. So I’m always happy to help other people. I get a lot of calls from people all the time who are going through that. I’ll talk to family members and friends and all of that, and I think that makes a difference. Again, being a health citizen is what I’m personally committed to.

Charlie Melcher:

I love that term health citizen.

Jim Weiss:

There are actually a couple books written by people like Jane Sson Khan, who’s a good friend and was an advisor of my company. And I think these are people who are on the cutting edge of seeing what’s new in digital health and tech driven and analytic driven healthcare that if we pay it forward with our knowledge and experience, a lot more people can benefit. And that’s sort of how I see it. And companies like mine, a couple thousand people having great health plans and great policies around sick leave and family leave and things like that that are important when people need to go address that because it’s really hard to get better if you’re trying to juggle all the work and life stresses that go along with it. If you can just get a hundred percent focused on getting well, you get well faster. So again, health citizenship I talk about a lot, but it’s hard to execute it in the real world for most people.

Charlie Melcher:

So what do you see coming in healthcare? How is new technologies impacting your business and particularly in the health communications space?

Jim Weiss:

Well, I think tech, as you know, it always facilitates and speeds things, but it’s still garbage in, garbage out. You’re not going to get a good AI solution unless what you feed into the AI machine is high quality, smart stuff. If your AI is built on top of garbage, you’re going to get garbage. It could help people ask these questions and get quick answers, quick credible answers rather than hours and hours of research. So if people knew what sunscreen to wear out and what time of day where they were, could we prevent more skin cancer? Yeah, probably. So I think there’s lots of little intelligence sources that do lead to better health and life outcomes if you’re paying attention to it. If you’re not, then you might not. But I think we’re at the dawn of a period where we could be our healthiest physically.

 

The concern I have, and here we are talking on a box, not in person. Since the pandemic, people really haven’t left their house. Some people just haven’t left their homes. I mean, so exactly how are we going to interact and create and do the things that have helped us get where we’ve gotten? How do you develop social skills and keep them honed when we’re kind of isolated and we’re not going out? And I have read a ton of articles about that more recently, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in the behavior of people. I love going to sporting events and I was just at the Super Bowl, I’m going to see the Warriors tomorrow night. I love being out in those settings where you’re meeting new people, but I couldn’t live without that. I don’t know how people can be. So inside,

Charlie Melcher:

I know that you have put a real emphasis on AI at real chemistry. Now that there’s, I noticed your website is kind of positioning that as one of the pillars of the business, and I didn’t see that there six months ago or a year ago.

Jim Weiss:

Well, it’s been around for a couple years and it had different names before. Data-Driven, tech enabled all that different words, but ultimately, this is just the latest of the tech that we want to bring to bear. And look, you asked me what the real advantage was. I think it’s speed we can get to answers faster. I think that’ll be the application in healthcare and biotech and biopharma. We’ll use AI to identify more specific targets quicker. So I’ve been investing in the space for several years already. We’re at a tipping point. Everyone uses it already and will use it increasingly. And now it’s really just about greater adoption and better application and making sure it doesn’t get applied for bad, but it probably will, and we have to recognize that.

Charlie Melcher:

So what’s next for you? What are you working on these days?

Jim Weiss:

What’s next for me? I work on all kinds of stuff. I like getting a little bit closer to the making of the medicine than talking about it. So I would say I’ve been investing in technology platforms from AI in drug development to cell therapy and other advances, immunotherapy, cancer vaccines. But I am also focused heavily in volunteer organizations like Cancer Research Institute, which is a group I’ve been involved with for a decade. And last year my wife’s situation was very life or death, and I turned it into something of an approach I would take in business as a project to manage. And that was a job. And now I think we’re going to turn that experience into something that will be foundation related, where we’re helping others, paying it forward and helping others access care and get information quickly and not just do traditional medicine, but also look at Eastern and other modalities like acupuncture and meditation and so many other things that have been known to people combined with traditional medicine. I think diet, exercise, all the rest that’ll make that experience better and the outcomes better. So that’s something we’re exploring as well. So I’m really just beginning. I’d love to be able to create greater and more direct impact on people’s lives.

Charlie Melcher:

Can’t wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Jim Weiss:

Fun. I’m doing it now, man. I’m doing it now.

Charlie Melcher:

This is it. We’re doing it.

Jim Weiss:

I’m just doing it. Yeah, there ain’t no next. It’s now. I

Charlie Melcher:

Look forward to continuing the conversation on a nice walkout in nature.

Jim Weiss:

Awesome, brother. Yeah, that’ll be cool. Thanks for having me. And let’s do it again.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been The Future of Storytelling Podcast. Thanks for joining me today. If you enjoyed the show, please consider giving it a five star rating on your podcast platform of choice and sharing it with a friend from healthcare to advertising, from entertainment to science and beyond, the world needs good storytellers. We at FoST strive to find and share the best creators, projects, and story technology with our community. To that end, we have a free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought, and an annual membership program called the FoST Explorers Club. You can learn more about both on our website@fost.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, charts and leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.