Removing Mental Health Stigmas – A Conversation with Katelyn Watson
Katelyn Watson is the Chief Marketing Officer for Talkspace, an online platform for mental health care. Katelyn has more than 20 years of experience building brands and messaging for both consumers and businesses. Her experience spans the digital healthcare, hospitality, and e-commerce industries and includes work at large brands, agencies, and start-ups. She was most recently Chief Marketing Officer at telehealth company Nurx, a subscription-based healthcare provider that offers birth control and other medications to more than one million patients. (Nurx was recently acquired by telehealth leader Thirty Madison.)
The Continuum got a chance to talk with Katelyn about starting her career at the very beginning of the digital age, choosing to pivot to health care, and using marketing to destigmatize mental health issues. She also offers some valuable advice to anyone who wants to be a CMO someday.
You got your start in the early days of digital marketing. Can you tell us about your first marketing roles?
I jumped right into digital after school, which I think of as a little bit of luck and a little bit of curiosity mixed with really good timing. It was 2001, and people were still in the “Wait, what’s Google?” phase of the internet. I was at a big Omnicom agency that was still primarily a traditional ad agency. We did direct mail, print ads, and out-of-home ads. Suddenly, all of our clients were asking about this digital thing and if they should put any of their money into it. My job was to run digital test campaigns for clients and then look at their budgets to figure out where digital fit into their media plans.
These were the days before people knew the phrase SEO, so everything was a lesson. We worked with high-end hotels, national restaurant chains, and financial institutions. They were more traditional brands that didn’t have an e-commerce presence. We worked with SunTrust Bank, for example. At the time, you could certainly get a bank account online and check your balance, but they were very much a brick-and-mortar company. I learned by default about optimizing searches, banner ads, and other methods of getting the brand message out there.
I also learned about the other side of the coin—performance. Brinker Restaurants was also a client. They own chains like Chili’s and Macaroni Grill. At the time, it wasn’t always clear who was coming into their restaurants. We helped them think about things through a performance lens; like, if you’re doing a coupon for 20% off dinner for the weekend, instead of just printing the coupon in the newspaper, use the printed ad to send them to your website, and collect their email address before giving them the coupon. Then, you can use that list in the future for remarketing.
It was the very beginning of companies thinking about putting digital in their marketing mix, and I was lucky enough to grow up in it.
You left the agency and went to the brand side; what brands did you work with, and how did your early digital experience help you there?
I loved working within an agency, but when you’re in the brands, you get to own the outcomes a lot more closely, and I wanted to do that. I started with La Quinta, the hotel chain. The company was really in reinvention mode when I got there. Digital had just started to become a thing in travel, and they had a lot of room to transform. When they hired me, they said, “We're starting to sell hotel rooms online. Historically, we used to sell to someone pulling over on the side of the road and saying, what does it cost for a night? What do we do with this?” I was able to come in having done this on the agency side and say, “Okay, let’s expand our search campaigns, let's build dynamic targeting, let's make more robust email acquisition, let’s optimize through banner ads and campaigns.” And that evolved to a very predictable, forecastable, numbers-driven performance that was all done through digital marketing.
“It’s about balance and diversifying your audiences — so even within one company — get as many different types of funnel experiences as possible, then there is nothing you can’t tackle as long as you understand the customer.”
Your first CMO title was for the online health brand Nurx. Can you tell us about that?
When I was looking for a CMO role, I really had to prove myself. Brands would say, “You're great at growth, performance numbers, and advertising, but how would you actually build a brand?” I had to tell the story about how you can build a brand through digital marketing and how, ultimately, brand and performance go hand in hand.
I was lucky because when I went to Nurx, the company was in high growth mode, and part of my job was to rebrand the company for what we wanted to be in the future. We didn’t change our name [which is pronounced noor-ex], but we needed everything else. There had not been any thought about what the brand stood for or evoking emotion with it.
Nurx started with prescription birth control but branched out into health areas. Once we started really building a brand, it was a lot easier for me to tell an all-encompassing story about how brand drives performance and performance drives the brand.
From there, you moved into your current role; what attracted you to Talkspace specifically?
There is such a dire need for mental health care right now. I knew I wanted to do something in that area. I talked to all of the mental health companies. I chose Talkspace, in part, because when I asked people about it, everyone had good things to say. A lot of people knew of the company because of the ad campaign with Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer. It aired in the early days of the pandemic, and he was one of the first to speak out about the mental health of athletes. We got a lot of brand recognition from that, but we also helped start conversations that are destigmatizing mental health issues, which is even more important.
Another thing that was attractive to me is that we’re not a giant company, but we’re public. I see that as a really good blend because it means we’re still nimble, but we have the financial rigors and controls set in place of a public company. Coming from a performance-marketing background, I think those pieces work really well together.
You mentioned that our society has started to destigmatize mental health issues. What do you think is changing?
I think the pandemic really spurred a lot of it. We were all going through the same thing at the same time and were all anxious about what would happen yet, and it became okay to talk about our anxiety. Then, you had a lot of celebrities like Michael Phelps, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato coming out and talking about their own experiences. In some ways, social media also helped. Our consumption of it went up because we were all home on our phones, and people on social started talking about depression and medication and normalizing it. At one point, there was a hashtag #postyourpill. I think that took a lot of the shame out of it.
The pandemic also brought a rise in telemedicine, which helps by providing a faster and more convenient way to get mental health care from the privacy of your own home. Talkspace has done a lot of studies, and we know that online therapy through telemedicine is as effective as in-person therapy and that online therapy through texting is equally, if not more effective, than video. Creating modalities that are flexible for people, that they can use anywhere, anytime, with someone who they trust, has changed this conversation and made it easier for people to imagine getting help.
Destigmatizing mental health is part of our mission, so as a brand, it's almost our responsibility to rip off that band-aid and talk about the things that people don't want to talk about. That’s what we do with our content. We go over myths versus facts about therapy. We use influencers to talk about the things you say to your therapist. We get testimonials from real patients who say they realize now that venting and talking to a therapist is a part of understanding your own emotions and learning how to solve problems. We also try to remind people that you don’t need to be in crisis. Talking to a therapist can be preventative or just a healthy habit like daily exercise.
“Destigmatizing mental health is part of our mission, so as a brand, it's almost our responsibility to rip off that band-aid and talk about the things that people don't want to talk about.”
What are some of the challenges you’re finding in marketing Talkspace?
Essentially, we have three different customers that we’re marketing to—patients, insurers, and those who may pay for Talkspace on behalf of their organization, like big employers, schools, and even local governments. When I came in, we were looking at this as different audiences, and we had siloed teams dedicated to each. I think about it differently; our audiences are all people – sure, you might pay out of pocket today but get insurance next month or vice versa. You might come in and out of coverage, but you’re still the same person who needs therapy. If you are an HR leader for your organization, a quality-of-care message resonates with you as much as it does a member.
We’ve brought it all under one umbrella now. If we're doing something that's SEO oriented, or we're running a PR campaign, we're always thinking about how it resonates with every single audience that we have, whether it's a payer, whether it's an employer, whether it's a member, whether it's someone paying out of pocket or using their insurance. We like to think about it from a human level. Employees are people. HR professionals are people. Insurance companies are made up of people. So, the human-first approach really works.
When we talk more about the fact that we're driving access by accepting insurance, we also get more people who pay out of pocket. Those ads are going to convert at much higher rates than just a regular ad for our services because accepting insurance is one way to set us apart from our competitors.
Switching gears before we let you go, this is your second time as a CMO. Are there lessons you would share with other people who have the role or are hoping to have it in the future?
The main piece of advice I would give is to talk to your CFO often. If you go into an organization and cannot tie the work you’re doing back to the bottom line in a predictable and forecastable way, it’s going to be very hard to work with your CFO, who holds the purse strings. The first thing I do when I go into a company is talk to the CFO about how my goals fit into the big-picture financials. I talk to my CFO every day. We're totally on the same page. She understands why I am spending money in what area and what the impact will hopefully look like. Honestly, if I can't show that impact or the strategic rationale, then I should rethink what I’m doing anyhow.
Another piece of advice I give to people who may want to be a CMO someday is to get as much experience as you can in as many funnels as possible. Companies pivot all the time. In the drive for efficiency, the “DTC was dead” mantra became a thing, and now we were all going to market B2B, especially in health care. But the telemedicine boom isn’t going anywhere, so now it’s about balance and diversifying your audiences — so even within one company — get as many different types of funnel experiences as possible. There is nothing you can’t tackle as long as you understand the customer.
My last piece of advice is about networking. Your network is so important, and the sooner you realize that networking is actually part of your job, the better. Take that phone call, go to lunch, be part of a marketing group, and build your CMO network. I’ve gotten myself jobs through the people I’ve met. I’ve gotten a lot of validation because, let’s face it, everyone has imposter syndrome sometimes. And I’ve been able to use other CMOs to bounce ideas off of. If you're not prepared to network like that, you’re going to be operating in a silo, and you're not going to get very far. Anyone who wants to be a CMO should do this and also go to therapy. I have to add that part.
September 19, 2023
