Category Archives: Marketing & Communications

Patient Experience videos on our new YouTube channel

By Paul Syrysko | Published: July 20, 2011

We’ve uploaded the first of a series of patient experience videos to our YouTube channel. We wanted to create a cohesive and distinctive series that captured intimacy in the conversations and allowed viewers to see personality even on very small screens such as mobile phones. And do it all within a very tight budget. The [...]

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How to photograph a plastic bag in 9 steps

By Paul Syrysko | Published: February 11, 2011
The setup; umbrellas on the floor reflected natural light back into the creases and shadows

Taking a picture of a plastic bag may seem the most inane marketing task but it brings myriad complexities. Faced with an urgent last minute job for an important exhibition and only three wrinkled samples to work with, we were challenged. This is how we did it. Given time and budget, you’d normally get this [...]

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Analysing web content semantics with AlchemyAPI: Part One – The Semantic Web

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 1, 2010
A visual representation of the world wide web. Image: the Opte project

How do you methodically analyse the context of hundreds of web pages? It’s an issue of semantics. Tasked with looking at how a bunch of organisations are portraying themselves to their stakeholders, we soon moved to clever machine analysis thanks to semantic tools that are slowly appearing. The semantic web (sometimes called Web 3.0) is [...]

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Google font API makes embedded web fonts easy, were it not for a bug

By Paul Syrysko | Published: November 12, 2010
Website for NUH Trust. Framework allows staff to load and edit content easily.

We’ve just been updating the design of one of our client’s sites and, as ever, fonts are a focus. Earlier this year, Google released a set of beautiful typefaces for use in web environments. It’s a simple matter of calling the font library from Google via a stylesheet header. Unless your choice includes Droid Bold. [...]

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A Five Step Process to Create a Successful Clinical Trials Marketing Strategy

By Paul Syrysko | Published: November 10, 2010
gloves

Any communication effort needs to follow a strategy. And, like any strategy, performance needs to be measurable. Clinical trials recruitment has very strict constraints and at first sight seems a tough nut to crack. However, for a seasoned marketing professional, these restrictions are no different than the myriad constraints you have in solving any marketing [...]

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What’s in a Name? The meaning of Propheris

By Paul Syrysko | Published: November 6, 2010
Brand_Name_page

I spent an awful lot of time searching for an appropriate name for this business. Possibly too long. But it’s so important. Everything hangs around the name. I needed something that delivered on a number of levels: short; .com domain available (yes there are alternatives but why would you?); delivering a feeling of gravitas and [...]

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The origins of cat herding, from television ads through Warren Bennis to Poul Anderson

By Paul Syrysko | Published: October 15, 2010
herding-cats

The phrase herding cats comes from a tv ad for an IT company and if few people know that, even fewer know that the term was lifted from a rather obscure management self-help book. Herding cats is now a ubiquitous phrase that has come into management-speak to describe tasks that are tricky because things are [...]

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Marketing, like journalism, is storytelling

By Paul Syrysko | Published: October 5, 2010
newspaper-pile

Putting together a good marketing strategy is concerned with compiling a positive story about a product or service. The narrative has to be consistent across several different communication channels. And the intended audience will only truly engage with it if what comes out is a proper narrative. To paraphrase a nice definition of journalism I [...]

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Evolution of a scientific poster design. From brief to finished product. Part Eight – Suddenly It Comes Together

By Paul Syrysko | Published: May 8, 2010
An A0 poster design for Nottingham's Biomedical Research Units

Finally, we’ve got some life into this work. And at the last minute, too. After I dug up some lovely vector files featuring gears from Bittbox and passed them onto my designer, our content was utterly transformed. It did the job. It was really important for me to push through some bold thinking, to flip [...]

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  • Welcome to Propheris Limited

    We are communications technology and marketing experts focused on the health sector.

    Our deep knowledge of digital and traditional channels enables us to craft your interfaces, information and messages efficiently and effectively, whether for use within your organisation or out to your customers and external stakeholders.

    We engage people with video, with websites and with database interfaces. And wherever appropriate, we link them all together to make the sum work more effectively than the parts.