In a Venn diagram showing the intersection between “advertising” and “healthcare,” the overlapping area would read “Megan Rech.” Here’s what Megan had to say recently about her background, her approach to working with people and how a college professor once (almost) crushed her dreams.
You work quite a bit with Media Bridge’s healthcare and medtech clients. How did that come about?
It’s funny, because for a long time I was the only person in my family not involved in healthcare. My mother was an X-ray technician, and my dad was a packaging engineer for Medtronic. I grew up bringing sample pacemakers to school for show-and-tell and spending Take Your Daughter to Work days watching clean room workers and sitting in hospital radiology departments.
I was the odd one out because I wanted to go into advertising. But the two worlds have collided, and I love it. Our work has turned a lot of heads over the years, and healthcare companies constantly want to tap our internal knowledge of DTC marketing and scaling through media.
What attracted you to advertising and media?
I don’t know the exact reason, but I always saw myself as a creative director. That dream ended when a college professor told me that one of my designs looked like crap (she might have used a stronger word than that). It wasn’t the most encouraging thing to say to a student, but it turns out my strengths really do lie on the people side of things. I love being around the creative side as well, but I’ll leave the design work to our awesome creative team.
Speaking of people, what’s your approach to working with clients?
I love that each person is different and no two days are the same. I like digging into challenges and going into “problem solver” mode. And I also enjoy figuring out each company’s personality, as well as the individual personalities within those organizations. We often have our clients take the same personality assessment we take. One minute, you might be dealing with a “lion” (taskmaster), the next minute a “turtle” (thinker). You have to adapt and be able to communicate well with everybody.
What do clients like most about you?
You’d have to ask them, but people often describe me as calm and patient. I apparently have that whole “ice water in the veins” thing, though sometimes I’m a little less calm under the surface than most people realize. 😀
What’s your advice to companies when it comes to media and advertising?
Many companies tend to focus more on the bottom of the sales funnel than the top. It’s natural to want warm leads and worry about how to drive patients to your website, but you can’t forget to fill the top of the funnel through brand awareness campaigns.
Media Bridge is unique in that our campaigns flow down from general brand awareness all the way through conversion — in the healthcare space, even arranging doctor-patient consultations. That’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful: We cover the entire funnel.