Cutting the Cord: WebMD pumps up its site with video
ABC News reporter Robin Roberts talks about how the future of medicine is now, featuring smartphone apps that register electrocardiograms and diagnose ear infections and wirelessly send the results to your doctor.
But she's not on ABC. She's on WebMD.
The medical news destination – it's been online since 1996 – has made a diagnosis about consumers: They want more video.
Its first course of treatment: the five-episode video series WebMD's Future of Health With Robin Roberts. All five just landed on WebMD.com, its mobile site and apps and WebMD's YouTube channel.
WebMD connected with Roberts' company, Rock'n Robin Productions, and narrowed down the topics: the future of vision, 3-D printing, obesity, infertility and wireless medicine.
Original digital video seemed the obvious prescription for WebMD to strengthen its health care information center. "I don't think people can get enough video," said Michael Smith, WebMD's medical director and chief medical officer.
"Everyone learns differently and everyone engages differently with health information. Video, especially high-premium video of this nature, also has an entertainment quality to it," Smith said. "Going forward, video will play an increasingly important role in WebMD's content offerings across all of our mobile and desktop offerings."
Roberts, who battled breast cancer and a rare blood disorder that required a bone marrow transplant, "just made perfect sense for WebMD because that is just exactly the type of person that we want to work with in creating health information for our audience," Smith said.
The series is one of the first projects from Roberts' new production company. Digital delivery is as important, if not more, than traditional TV "because so much is going online," said John Green, vice president of Rock'n Robin Productions and executive producer of special programming at ABC News.
The production team approached the project "much the same way that we would approach the journalism as if we were producing it for ABC," Green said.
Episodes run a bit longer than typical TV fare. "The luxury of being able to produce these episodes at five to six minutes (in length) was really something that we liked," Green said. "The stories breathe a little bit more."
WebMD isn't the first to offer original premium content. Pepsi has become a content creation machine, focusing big pop culture splashes around major events. For the World Cup, its Beats of the Beautiful Game CD and iTunes collection had a collection of online short films – Spike Lee among the directors – to accompany each track from the artists, which included Janelle Monae and Kelly Rowland.
For the Grammys, Pepsi began an Out of the Blue music campaign with prizes through mid-May and original Pepsi content online — on YouTube and Pepsi.com — with artists such as Fall Out Boy and Charlie XCX.
Similarly, Marriott has a fully stocked YouTube channel with Two Bellmen, an in-the-works action-comedy based at the JW Marriott L.A. Live, being documented with behind-the-scenes updates, and Experience More With Mobile Check-In, a series about top destinations such as New York and L.A.
The Yellow Pages has its own "Make Every Day Local' site with original content starring Giuliana and Bill Rancic, ESPN anchor Hannah Storm and country music artist Jake Owen (also on YP's YouTube channel).
This is just the beginning for premium content from untraditional sources, says James McQuivey, a principal analyst with research firm Forrester. "The fact is, it is now so cheap and easy to product high-quality video that it's really surprising we don't have even more of these kinds of productions," he said. "Sure, not everyone can produce House of Cards, but every health care provider, electric utility, food manufacturer – the list goes on – can and should be thinking how they use the audience's insatiable appetite for video content to communicate their unique message."
In the case of WebMD, it's interesting because the medical site partnered with an ABC News personality. It's a gamble for ABC, he says. "That's thinking like a disrupter, for sure, and it's something big media companies have had to learn the hard way as they've learned that their brands are not the only ones people will turn to for news and lifestyle information," McQuivey said.
"Cutting the Cord" is a regular column covering Net TV and ways to get it. If you have suggestions or questions, contact Mike Snider via e-mail. Follow him on Twitter: @MikeSnider.