Havas Health CX's Jane Motz Hayes on Storytelling and Trust Building in Health Tech

Jane Motz Hayes is chief creative and design officer at Havas Health CX and a customer experience leader whose passion for design is combined with an interest in the nexus of technology with storytelling.

With 20 years of professional experience in startups, agencies and large organizations, Jane leads creative, UX/UI and product design teams in creating innovative, elegant work at scale. Jane has designed digital experiences in multiple industries and has produced award-winning content for brands in the energy, finance, media, automotive, and health and wellness categories.

Jane lectures at the University of Toronto iSchool, teaching coursework in accessibility and inclusive design to master’s candidates. Jane’s previous work in film/TV as a producer at her film company Berkeley Films has garnered her many awards for both she and her partner, writer/director Jonathan Hayes.

We spoke with Jane for our series Checkup, where we chat with leaders in the healthcare marketing space.

Jane, tell us…

Where you grew up, and where you live now.

I was born in Canada and have lived here my entire life. Initially I lived in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, which is home to BlackBerry and other tech companies in Silicon Valley North. I moved to Toronto for university and never left.

How you first got into healthcare marketing, and what attracted you to it.

My background is in user experience but also in film/TV production, and so I’ve always been drawn to telling stories that both inform and entertain with the audience in mind. Healthcare marketing fits in this sweet spot nicely because we are tasked with bringing information to clients and their customers in the most beautiful, usable way possible. I’m incredibly passionate about inclusive design and bringing accessible experiences to our clients and their customers.

Something people might not know about the healthcare industry.

It’s a fascinating space at the crossroads of technical innovation and design where hardworking creative people focus on human purpose and making people’s lives better. There is so much opportunity for agencies and brands to truly bring diverse groups together to co-create the next generation of products and services.

A recent project you’re proud of.

I adore Fieeld, the innovative Clio- (among others) winning work from Havas NOW in partnership with Banco Santander. This touch-based system allows blind sports fan to follow the movement of the ball using a pointer moving over the device, which is fed from information brought in from high-definition camera pointed around the field. Each ball movement renders on the device and allows the fan to follow along with their fingertips. What I love about this device, and the creative technologists that designed it, is that it brings in blind fans who have been left out of traditional broadcasting and enables them to fully participate in the excitement of watching sport.

Someone else’s project in healthcare that you were impressed by recently.

“Printed by Parkinson’s” by Innocean Berlin for Charite Berlin University Hospital. It represents the very nexus of art, technology, creativity and medical science. The project tells six stories of people with Parkinson’s who found an average object difficult to use as their disease progressed. When their kinetic and neurological data was captured into data sets, it was sent to 3-D printers to make works of art that toured galleries. I was moved when I watched the film on how this project came together and felt inspired to find cross-disciplinary ways to work with our clients to inject art and creativity into their business problems.

A major challenge facing healthcare advertisers today.

Cyber security and building trust in technology systems will be one of the biggest challenges facing us in healthcare advertising. Rapidly increasing investment in A.I. to combat disease progression and predicting care outcomes means marketers will be faced with communicating the power of prediction without evoking patient concerns about data privacy and security. Designers will be tasked with building elements of trust into user interfaces through smart first-party data capture, user-friendly surveys and forms, and authentic messaging that will allow consumers to see the human side of the brand.

One thing about how healthcare is evolving that you’re excited about.

Healthcare is at an inflection point because of the pandemic, and there is a huge opportunity for healthcare to use digital technologies and data to improve people’s lives through designing treatment plans and therapeutics that are specific to individuals, for example. As marketers we need to be more data driven in our solutions, product development, service design and creative realizations. Knowing we will need to think differently, and try new things, is exciting for me because it presents a design problem—in both getting our clients to shift their perspective on where to spend marketing dollars and using our creativity to show them the benefits of doing so.

How healthcare can attract more creative talent.

As new medicines, vaccines and health tech are developed, the storytellers will help consumers conceptualize these advances and relate to them—this is where I think the savvy next generation of creative talent can have huge impact. We talk a lot about human purpose at Havas Health CX, and how our work has the potential to make people’s lives better. I want the new guard of Gen Z creatives to know they can work on purpose-driven work for brand names they know very well (have you had a vaccine recently?) and using their influencer-aware, inclusion-minded, globally informed perspectives to design campaigns that engage people with health and wellness.

What would you be doing if you weren’t in healthcare marketing?

Making movies, of course! But I also love gardening and being outside tending to my flowers, plants and vegetables. So, if I had to pick another career, it would be landscape architecture. My second choice would be an F1 driver. A ride with Aston Martin, Mercedes or Ferrari would put me on a team with my favorite drivers.