Home / Results / Erin Brockovich
A multinational pharmaceutical company owned the product, the brand and the budget. Practice Proof helped Erin Brockovich's Essure 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.
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. Practice Proof moved into it on two fronts.
Organic. The play: let the audience become the content. Instead of conventional campaign copy, Practice Proof enabled women 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. 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, convert it into an asset you own.
A pharmaceutical giant had the product. Practice Proof gave the campaign the conversation.
Everyone talks about E-E-A-T, topical authority, and owning the search journey now. Practice Proof was doing it more than a decade ago.
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 your audience to become part of the content itself.
The result wasn't just rankings. The campaign 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.
Book a strategy call →