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A multinational pharmaceutical company owned the product, the brand and the budget. Working closely with Erin Brockovich and a determined Facebook community of women affected by Essure, Practice Proof helped the advocacy platform outrank it anyway.
A multinational pharmaceutical company owned the product, the brand, and the budget. Women searching for the truth about Essure, the procedure, the complications, the removal experiences, were meant to find the manufacturer's messaging first.
The problem: corporations describe products in the language of the company. Patients search in the language of the patient. Nobody was capturing that second conversation.
Dan Toombs, founder of Practice Proof, saw an arbitrage opportunity hiding in plain sight, and it only worked because of who else was already in the room. Erin Brockovich and her team brought the platform, the credibility, and the reach to make women feel safe sharing their stories in the first place. A large, deeply engaged Facebook community of women who had undergone the Essure procedure brought the lived experience and the willingness to speak publicly that no agency could manufacture on its own. Practice Proof brought the search and content strategy to turn that collective voice into something Google, and eventually the manufacturer, couldn't ignore.
There was enormous, rising search demand for real, patient-language answers about Essure, and almost no supply. The manufacturer was publishing polished corporate copy that answered the questions the company wanted to answer, not the ones women were actually typing into Google. That gap between demand and supply was the mispricing. The three of us, Erin's team, the Facebook community, and Practice Proof, moved into it together, on two fronts.
Organic. The play: let the audience become the content. Instead of conventional campaign copy, the platform enabled women, many of them already connected through that Facebook community, to publish their own Essure experiences, and thousands did. Each story added highly specific, highly searchable content in the exact terminology real women were using: symptoms, complications, questions, fears. Practice Proof shaped the site architecture and SEO strategy to capture and compound that, but the content itself, the trust, and the willingness to be public came from the women and from Erin's platform. This turned a one-time content spend into a compounding asset, a self-reinforcing loop where women searched, discovered the site, read others' stories, added their own, and pulled in the next wave. This is the same principle behind the authority-building content and content strategy work we run for every client: the return climbed while the cost stayed flat.
Paid. Because the manufacturer wasn't bidding on patient-intent terms, those clicks were dramatically underpriced. Practice Proof captured high-intent traffic at a fraction of typical acquisition cost through disciplined paid search, then funneled it into the same owned content engine, so paid didn't just buy a visit, it fed the organic SEO loop that kept compounding after the ad spend stopped. That's the arbitrage in full: buy attention where it's cheap, and let a genuine community turn it into an asset everyone involved could be proud of.
A pharmaceutical giant had the product. Erin Brockovich, a community of women who refused to stay quiet, and Practice Proof gave the campaign the conversation, together.
Everyone talks about E-E-A-T, topical authority, and owning the search journey now. This collaboration was doing it more than a decade ago, and it worked because it was never just a marketing exercise. It was Erin Brockovich's credibility, a Facebook community's courage in sharing their own stories, and Practice Proof's search and content strategy, each doing the part only they could do.
The arbitrage principle still holds: find the gap between what an audience is searching for and what the market is actually supplying, organically and in the ad auction, then own it before anyone else does. It was never about stuffing keywords into pages, or spraying budget at broad terms. It's about understanding what people search for, why, and what they want when they arrive, then building the infrastructure for a genuine community to become part of the content itself.
The result wasn't just rankings. The campaign, and the women behind it, challenged the manufacturer's control of the narrative around its own product.
If your firm needs to be found where the real conversation is happening, not just where the budget is biggest, let's talk.
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