User and Employee Generated Content

I was the healthcare voice among consumer brands, and the lessons travelled in both directions.

Mine to them: trust no longer flows hierarchically, it flows laterally, through people you know and voices you have chosen, which means the creator economy has immense potential for good in countering medical misinformation. And the best content moments are created, not commissioned: at a major cardiology congress in London we built a professional studio into the booth, unbranded bar a detail, and clinicians queued up to use it because it looked good, sounded good and got their message out.

Theirs to me: manufactured-organic campaigns that empower real customers rather than faking them, comment sections as the truest focus group, and hard evidence that audiences punish AI slop; in one analysis of Super Bowl reaction content, more than half the complaints about the adverts were about exactly that.

I also talked about turning colleagues into credible opinion leaders through consistent, authentic content (patients used to tell me the person they saw on Sky News was exactly the person in the A&E cubicle, and that consistency is the point), why we now actively look for ways to prove our content is not AI-generated, and a plea I made twice from the stage: these tools are addictive, so use them in moderation, for connection rather than doom-scrolling. Pharma’s regulation came up as a gift once again: the space around the product, like congress trailers and a journalistic health platform, is where the industry can innovate freely.