Ro’s Will Flaherty: Healthcare Marketing Needs ‘Real Human Stories’

Dispatches from Cannes Lions 2026: Interviews on Innovation, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2026

Ro’s Will Flaherty: Healthcare Marketing Needs ‘Real Human Stories’

CANNES, France — Ro, the direct-to-patient marketing company, is trying to change the perception of healthcare advertising. The vertical has long suffered a reputation for being boring and formulaic (add your own “side effects include” litany of bizarre possibilities).

On a basic level, healthcare ads often seem detached from the real human experiences that drive patients to seek care. 

Ro is deliberately working to dismantle those associations through creative storytelling and influencer partnerships spanning everyday people to Serena Williams.

“Consumers have a model of healthcare advertising as boring, staid, formulaic, structured, and we try to flip that,”Will Flaherty, svp of growth at Ro, told Beet.TV contributorDavid Kaplanat Cannes Lions. “Every patient is a human. Every patient has real human motivations and reasons why they seek care, reasons why they’re looking for help or looking to make a change in their health journey.”

Trust remains the defining variable that separates healthcare marketing from virtually every other consumer category — requiring consistency, creative thoughtfulness, and time that impulse-driven CPG categories simply don’t demand.

Influencers convey human stories

Ro’s weight management, sexual health, dermatology, and fertility categories each address conditions affecting tens of millions of Americans, creating a natural breadth of relatable storytelling opportunities across all levels of public visibility.

“Our thought is it’s our way to tell really thoughtful brand stories across these personas — across someone who’s an influencer all the way up to someone like Serena Williams, who we partner with for our weight management vertical,” Flaherty said. “The human thread of the challenges they’re trying to solve for — trying to lose weight after having kids, overcoming an injury, seeking help for a longstanding skincare issue — all these things are relatable at all strata of fame.”

Search shifts toward AI and video

Consumer health discovery is evolving along two tracks — traditional and AI-powered search for condition education and symptom research, alongside vertical video consumption on mobile for product and service discovery.

“Search is an incredibly important part of the journey. Consumers are asking Google or now increasingly AI engines, ‘Tell me more about this symptom, how can I treat this condition?’“ Flaherty said. “But we also realize a lot of that search behavior is shifting even to video and vertical video. So we’re thinking about both of those planes simultaneously.”

Linking brand and performance

Ro rejects the internal separation of brand and performance marketing budgets, instead treating all marketing investment as contributing to business growth on different time horizons rather than through fundamentally different mechanisms.

“We don’t internally view any difference between brand and performance marketing. We think that even performance channels can have brand elements,” Flaherty said. “We might want to make an investment, something that changes the perception of our business or the broad awareness of it. That may not lead to someone purchasing in that moment, but that’s still a valuable exercise.”

This unified view avoids the measurement dissonance that emerges when separate teams optimize toward separate goals, instead pursuing the blend of tactics that builds the business over the long run.

“Instead of putting them in different camps, look at it as one, understand how they work together, and really pursue the best blend of tactics in the long run and build the business,” Flaherty said.

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