Sanofi-aventis : Dispensing advice

A web tv service opens up channels of communication.

The Site

Sanofi-aventis, a France-based pharmaceuticals company, has a multi-channel web tv service that provides news and features programming.

Sanofi-aventis has its own broadcast service on the Internet, operating on a discrete site, sanofi-aventis.tv, that is promoted selectively on its dot com site. The service is a platform for short video content covering company news, interviews with executives and healthcare professionals, and information films on personal health issues. These are programmed across six ‘channels’: Spotlight on sanofi-aventis, Our expertise, Around the world, Your health, Solidarity and Working for people. Your health has six sub-categories of programme (for example, Diabetes, Infectious diseases, Lifestyle), each with a choice of films listed on a thumbnail menu next to the viewing screen.

Each video is clearly dated and can be rated, shared with a friend (send an e-mail link), added to a social media page (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) or downloaded as a transcript (text version). Like the main site, the service is available in English and French, with a simple toggle allowing a switch between them. Content is sub-titled according to the current choice of language irrespective of the one in which it was recorded.

The Takeaway

It might not be television in the form viewers of traditional networks with their rolling schedules know it. But Sanofi-aventis.tv is something more than a slick and engaging way of formatting the company’s video library and webcasts (though it certainly is that). It sits in a position to benefit from the transition being wrought in how content is consumed by the availability and inter-action of ‘big’ television, broadband-driven online screening and viewing, and social media. Aspects of all three can be seen in the style and formatting of the programmes, the ‘on demand’ iPlayer-style access and the sharing options.

The viral marketing aspects of the service are clearly one if its attractions to Sanofi-aventis as a return on its investment. But it is also an appealing (and traffic-stimulating) way to satisfy the public’s appetite for using the web to find health information (85 per cent of European internet users did so in 2009, according to manhattanResearch). In fact, just what the doctor ordered.

First published on 11 February, 2010