ePharma Love Affairs

There have been several great love affairs in the digital pharma world, and we wanted to highlight a few for Valentine’s Day -

Couple of the year...

Doctors heart Apple products. Our 2011 Taking the Pulse® U.S. study found that 75 percent of U.S. doctors owned either an iPhone, iPad, or iPod – far outpacing adoption of Android and BlackBerry devices. The iPad in particular is poised to transform the physician workday. As of last Q1 (just one year after the iPad first hit the market) already 30 percent of doctors owned one and an additional 28 percent said they planned to buy one within 6 months. Additionally, these doctors expressed strong interest in using iPads to facilitate practice management and patient education. The 2012 version of Taking the Pulse® U.S. is just about to go into fielding and we expect to see a significant boost in iPad ownership from last year. One thing should remain the same though – doctors’ love affair with Apple will likely remain strong.

An enduring romance...

In a report a few years ago, we referred to search as the little black dress of marketing – a classic that never goes out of style. And now a few years later, when it comes to online health research, search is still very much in vogue. When consumers seek health information on the Internet in key medical scenarios, such as when experiencing new symptoms, preparing for a doctor’s visit, or after receiving a prescription, the vast majority rely on search engines rather than going directly to a website. Additionally, consumers are more likely to use search engines than web browsing or apps to find prescription drug information on their mobile phones. While some technology pundits claim the online landscape is shifting towards a narrower digital world characterized by apps and a declining need for browser-based searching – in digital health, the fires of romance should keep burning for search and consumers at least for the time being.

Star-crossed lovers…

The relationship between social and pharma is, well, complicated. On the one hand, our latest ePharma Consumer® study found that 42 percent of online consumers agree that pharma companies should be involved in online health communities, and this expectation is even higher among certain caregiver and patient groups. On the other hand, even with recent FDA draft guidelines, it doesn’t seem marketers are finding that it’s getting any easier to navigate the social media regulatory minefield. Additionally, when it comes to getting questions answered directly from pharma company representatives, very few consumers want this messaging via general social networking forums like Twitter or Facebook. Throw in the challenges of social ROI measurement and you’ve got a relationship ripe for angry phone hang ups and late night tears into pints of Ben & Jerry’s. So while pharma and social media may not be headed for divorce yet, the union will likely encounter its share of stormy weather for the foreseeable future. But just as we hope against hope that Seal and Heidi reconcile, we can remain optimistic that this pair can somehow work it out in the end!


Sources: Manhattan Research - Taking the Pulse® U.S. 2011, Cybercitizen Health® U.S. 2011, ePharma Consumer® 2011

This guest post was contributed by Maureen Malloy, Senior Healthcare Analyst, Manhattan Research Maureen Malloy is a Senior Healthcare Analyst at Manhattan Research, with a focus on consumer digital health trends. You can find her on Twitter or at Manhattan Research’s blog.  This post is co-posted with the Manhattan Research Blog.

ePharma Summit 2012 - That's a Wrap!

By Casey Ferrell

Research Analyst, Cutting Edge Information

Guest Blogger

Okay, it’s been almost 24 hours since ePharma Summit 2012 wrapped. Like a good holiday feast, if you did it right you’re probably still digesting the experience like I am. Day One’s symposia offered a more intimate setting for attendees to interact with panelists, while Day Two was a big bacchanal of sessions, networking, keynotes, and panels. Day Three was a tamer affair, with more targeted sessions focusing on case studies and practical applications of the principles discussed the day before. Based on conversations with fellow attendees, Wednesday’s content was a welcome transition from the “what and why” to the “how.”

I’ll briefly recap roughly half of the day’s sessions, but before I do I wanted to share some general observations I took away from the event as a whole. First, there are some very impressive individuals working within the epharma space. I won’t open Pandora’s box and start naming names lest I inevitably overlook someone, but suffice it to say that the future of digital promotion in pharma is bright if the industry figures out how to retain the enterprising intellectual capital on hand at this conference (and that's a big if - there is a brain drain underway in digital pharma). I spend a lot of my professional time taking a long view of the role that digital can, should and is now playing in the industry, and clearly so do a great many of the people asked to speak at ePharma Summit.

A general take-away was that the industry is gradually shifting from a tactically driven approach to a one driven by strategy. Hallelujah, might I add. Companies are less and less interested in being the first kid on the block with a sweet new iPad app than they are being the kid on the block with an iPad app that has real uptake, aligns with broader marketing goals and serves the customer in some kind of meaningful way. Again, hallelujah. In my experience conducting digital pharma benchmarking research, this shift has been underway for some time, and because it is being codified by new internal structures like centralized dedicated digital departments and multidisciplinary digital task forces, you’re now starting to see how pharma is beginning to get a handle on smarter ways to execute digital promotion.

This is critically important for the following reason: in the years since the internet came onto the scene MLR has been unjustly portrayed as a monolithic, unmovable object standing in the way of digital “progress,” and as a result, an already tense relationship between it and marketers became downright antagonistic. It used to be that marketers would push to open a branded Facebook page for their product simply because everyone else had one, or because their marketing friend at Nike said it was The Future. It used to be that these things were undertaken hastily, rashly even, due to a perceived urgency that if they were not, everyone would laugh at them. And in so doing, marketers had a hell of a time justifying them to leadership and to MLR. Now, though, it seems that people in digital pharma are learning the wisdom of tying digital campaigns to an existing bedrock of marketing strategy, thereby contributing to a more collaborative and less combative approach to building digital creative and getting it out the door. In other words, the more epharmateers recognize the value (and lack thereof, in many some cases) of digital and how it fits within the broader marketing strategy of a brand, be it corporate or product, the more likely it is that it will not only get approved but have some kind of real and measurable impact. The days of building smartphone apps to reach an elderly target audience who don’t own smartphones are mercifully coming to an end. This shift is painfully slow, but it is underway.

My one suggestion for next year’s ePharma Summit is simple: open the back channel up to the rest of the audience. It’s no secret that a significant proportion of attendees are active on Twitter, and actively use it during the conference sessions to communicate to one another and those following the conference-sponsored hashtag, #epharma. What would greatly add value to the conversations taking place on the stage, on the floor and online is if everyone could see the thoughts of their peers and react or respond to dissenting views, nearly all of which are as insightful and thoughtful as the ones being agreed upon on stage. Open the kimono, put the “e” in ePharma, and put up the Tweetstream next year. I guarantee a more lively and engaged audience. Because that’s what everyone here is after anyway, right? Engagement?

Okay, onto the sessions. What can I say about Andy Smith, author of The Dragonfly Effect? Smith is an able presenter with a gift for beautiful storytelling through slides. I won’t get into the nitty gritty specifics of his talk (I suggest you read the book), but his message to pharma was that when lives are on the line, you have carte blanch to invent compelling ways to engage with people on behalf of other people. He told a touching story about two friends diagnosed with Leukemia around whom a rather incredible effort was built to find suitable bone marrow donors (they were both South Asian, exacerbating the difficulty of finding a match stateside). Social media and digital channels played a massive role in organizing hundreds of marrow registration drives that led to matches for both friends. Sadly, they relapsed and lost the struggle, but the lesson Smith took away was the power of social networking to drive remarkable health outcomes. “Revolutions start by the actions of a few ordinary people. Find the ignition point and light it,” Smith said.

Two interesting case study panels followed. The first, I Wish I’d Done That!: Social Media, was led by Todd Kolm, director of emerging channel strategy at Pfizer, who was joined by panelists Alison Woo, director of social media, BMS and Zoe Dunn, principal, Hale Advisors. Kolm delighted in showing the audience what not to do with Twitter through non-pharma examples of social media failings, from the f-bomb drop at Chrysler to the utter ignorance showed by Kenneth Cole during Egyptian uprising. For those who aren’t familiar with these examples, I encourage you subscribe to a feed such as Mashable or TechCrunch where you will be sure not to miss the latest flub in corporate social media. There are lessons to be learned, even if it is outside pharma. Among the most important of these lessons is to know that social media is earned media — so make sure you earn it. Dunn pointed out a number of examples of pharma social media done well, including Sanofi’s Allegra OTC campaign and Pfizer’s Viagra counterfeit YouTube video. Woo offered her own take on good examples of “socpharm” as well as her social media best practices, which are simple but indispensable:

·         Have a target audience; you can’t reach everyone

·         Create a compelling message

·         Think about value for audience

·         Use the right tool for the right audience

·         Measure metrics

·         Think of engagement as an ongoing practice

The I Wish I’d Done That!: Mobile session was led by David Kopp, senior VP of consumer media, Healthline Networks. Joining him were Jay Appel, director of physician relationship marketing, Amgen; Scott Wolf, executive VP of sales, Everyday Health; John Viera, senior director of strategic marketing, Daiichi Sankyo; and Kate Miller, director, Evolution Road. Two things really jumped out during this session: one idea and one tactic that both have a lot to say about where mobile is going. The idea was suggested by Viera, citing Progressive’s Snapshot, which documents real-time driving behavior and incentivizes people through lowered premiums to drive more safely. The application to pharma is already happening, he said, though the quantified self movement and apps that track human biodata. Viera thinks that the future of mobile will be in passive technologies that collect health outcomes data which companies can then leverage in negotiations with payers. That will be quite interesting indeed. Another example, also pointed out by Viera, of an effective campaign was the TextInTheCity SMS initiative to reach at-risk teens. The decidedly “low-tech” tactic actually helped the campaign have a much better penetration and uptake because the target population was much  more likely to have feature phones than smartphones. Just another example where knowing your audience and using the appropriate channel to reach them. Had the campaign tried to get fancy for fancy’s sake, it would have failed.

After lunch (that flan in the tall shot glasses was pretty sweet… thank you, I’m here every Wednesday night), I attended the Multichannel Consumer Marketing track again. An interesting session by Deborah Radcliffe, director, Consumer Center of Expertise at Pfizer, focused on how to open up your content to sharing and how to do so compliantly. What follows is a handy list of questions you need to have the answers to if you want to take the plunge into the world of sharing (and there is ample reason to do so: 73% of people say they process info more deeply, thoroughly and thoughtfully when it’s shared with the):

·         What’s the objective?

·         How does sharing help achieve that?

·         What’s the target’s sharing behavior?

·         How does content you want sharable align to marketing objectives?

·         Is your content relevant?

·         Is it valuable?

·         Is it share worthy?

·         If you applied the seven factors that prompt sharing (laughter, inspiration, cuteness, originality, shock, surprise and nostalgia), what would you learn? Is it touching people?

·         What might you do to increase share worthiness?

·         What does your target think of your stuff?

·         And most critically: do you have the tool to do it?

Following this was a brilliant session by Todd Siesky, communications and external relations, Roche Diabetes Care US and Robert Muller, associate marketing manager, global marketing, Roche Diabetes Care US. They talked about the success they’ve had in developing cause marketing. The reach of their campaigns grew exponentially when they were able to gain the trust and partnerships of some 30 of the most influential diabetes bloggers, which took guts, persistence and humility on Roche’s part. To me, the essence of the session was this:  vision drives strategy drives tactics, and when you start with vision and add to it a long-term, sustained commitment, the results can be remarkable.

EPharma wrapped with a session on the global marketing environment. Mark Bard of the Digital Health Coalition led a panel comprising Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest,  Ray Chepesiuk, commissioner, PAAB, and Muller from Roche. Pitts talked about the importance of intent when dealing with cross-jurisdictional snafus. If you’re trying to be cute and skirt compliance, regulatory agencies are going to catch you, Pitts said, adding that “the .eu or .ca is not a get out of jail free card.”

So, that’s it from ePharma Summit 2012. Hope you enjoyed the tweeting and blogging! If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it. I'm on Twitter (@Casey_CEI), and I'd love to continue there the conversations we started this week. If you loved or hated what I brought to the table, do let @epharma know so they can decide whether the should can me or bring me back next time. Hopefully it's the latter and I'll be seeing you all again soon. Thanks for reading!

#ePharma Wednesday Updates and Commentary

Kudos to Andy Smith and his presentation on the Dragonfly Effect. Aside from having one of the best designed presentations (along with @PeteDTweets yesterday), he presented three examples that we not just inspiring, but relevant to almost everyone in the room. While only one was directly health care related, I was impressed by the amount of work he put in to relating these non-pharma examples to pharma. For example, his Coke case study seems anti-theatrical to pharma (they sell sugar water), and yet I, and others around me, could immediately see how to apply the lessons to our work. This was our anticipated return on the cost of attending -- to be inspired, not by a magical future beyond the horizon, but by ideas we can put to work today.

Beyond that came an object lesson from Peter Frishauf and Jay Goldman in discussing the value that SMS message could play in a brand. Text messaging has been relegated to the junk drawer of our marketing tool kits despite the fact that it is functional, useful, and has a reach Apple, Google and Facebook can only dream about. Their presentation influenced any discussion regarding mobile for much of the rest of the day. After lunch, Scott Wearley opened up and gave everyone of us a realistic and reasonable blueprint for relationship marketing. This wasn't broad strokes and vague ideas, this was a set of instructions better than those that come with Ikea furniture. Take it home, build it yourself.  I was very much impressed by what Robert Krensel and William Tunno had to say. The pictures were pretty, but the conversation on how best to utilize Those pretty pictures showed a depth of thought and consideration I wasn't expecting at all. At both these sessions, I took a lot of notes. However, without being too much of a curmudgeon (it seems someone else is filling that slot quite well), I'd like to call a few things out. First, I appreciate the value of great big numbers to grab attention. But telling me that a billion iPhones were sold or a trillion Facebook accounts were created doesn't help any of us. These numbers are as helpful as the fact that it's usually warm in NYC. What's worse is when these broad numbers aren’t just useless, but edge into the territory of obfuscation. For example, when you call out that 37% of all new tablet sales are Android tablets, this is an aggregate number that doesn't reflect the facts on the ground that HCPs are now and continue to be passionate iPad users. The same is true for calling out sites like Pinterest and Tumblr as “hot new properties” without revealing that both site have very narrow audiences (good luck running that Viagra campaign on Pinterest without a radical reworking).

There was an interesting conversation I had with a few people this morning. I won't call out who they are, but it occurred after the presentation that listed all those twitter blunders, notably from non-pharma brands (because pharma always does social right? If you say so). There was a running bet as to what percentage of the audience had not heard all of these twitter blunders before (and some were pretty famous, like the Kenneth Cole/Eygpt tweet and the Chrysler agency posting about Detroit drivers who couldn't drive). Our group assumed that most people had heard of all of them. When we asked around, we found was that most people hadn't, and that some hadn't heard of any. If you are active in marketing, especially in eMarketing, these tales should be as familiar as the case study surrounding New Coke. That conversation turned shifted on twitter, where people mentioned sites like mashable.com and boingboing.org where news like this is a hot commodity. Plenty of people chimed in with other great sites for Web 2.0-type news until someone suggested that having this conversation on twitter meant that the people who needed to hear about them would be missing out; those people were not just ignoring the twitter back-channel, they were willfully ignoring the rest of the web world. They were only aware of things like Facebook and Twitter and mobile healthcare apps and iPad content delivery in so much as they needed to be for a given project and no more. I worry when I think about stories like these.

One of the amazing things about social media is its ability to create, manage and strengthen the connections between ourselves and so many others. I know so many people who turned their organizations on to twitter because they were hooked on twitter themselves. And yet, here we see a huge segment of the audience paying money to be told how incredibly important twitter (and it's brethren, no need to be twitter-specific) is to their campaigns and to their brands, indeed to their own livelihoods, but never dipping their toes into the water. Aren't these the risks we all said we wanted to talk and have others take within our organizations? Are we just talking, or do we really mean it? So I implore you, you delightful participants of ePharmaSummit 2012, jump in. Be part of the conversation. Agree and disagree. Pick a fight online among your peers and lose. See what those tools your company is paying so much money to leverage can really do. As for places to learn more about the eMarketing world outside of pharma, my twitterzens (twitter citizens? I admit I made that one up) and I came up with the following list: Mashable.com Techcrunch.com Engadget.com Lifehacker.com Allthingsdigital.com Cnet.com Boingboing.org (be aware, they will reference Burning Man on this site. Don't be alarmed.) Notes about what was said on stage can be found at bit.ly/epharmasummit.

Big virtual high-fives to Sarah Gordon and Jennifer Pereira for getting Casey and I invited to all these sessions so we could bring the best to you. They bent over backwards to help us help you, and I hope their bosses read this far down the blog post. Thanks also to Casey Ferrell for letting me partner up with him in this blogging experiment. We hope we did you, the presenters, the organizers and our peers proud (so if you got something out of this, let @epharma know! Otherwise we won't get invited back!). Beyond that, please please please feel free to engage me on twitter @digital_pharma or schedule lunch with me if you’re in Chicago. Good night!

#ePharma: Day Two Roundup

By Casey Ferrell

Research Analyst, Cutting Edge Information

Guest Blogger

Well, we’re two thirds of the way through the 2012 ePharma Summit. Day One was a full day of symposia, while Day Two was a mishmash of sessions, keynotes, thought leader panels, futurists, multichannel tracks, examples of award winning campaigns and coffee. Lots of coffee. 

My colleague James Ellis and I were live tweeting the day’s events, but we are going to provide a roundup blog here to help flesh out beyond 140 characters what the sessions had to offer. We split up the job, so between both of our blog roundups, you’ll get a pretty comprehensive view of the day, minus coffee breaks and totally unrelated bathroom breaks.

Charlotte McKines, the global VP of marketing communications and channel strategies (that’s right, global) at Merck and Co., had an excellent presentation on how a multinational company might look at the evolution of digital channels and how they can fit not just within a company’s overarching marketing strategy but within that company’s overall business goals. McKines’ well-organized presentation outlined three primary ways in which digital is transforming the industry. Looking beyond the pill, she said, digital is “the connecting point, the core enabler that allows us connect to our stakeholders.” With digital experiencing a meteoric rise — 86% of physicians go to the web daily to gather health, medical or prescription drug information — whoever “gets there” first will have a major competitive advantage, McKines said. The three keys to getting there are:

•  Adjusting the organizational mindset
•  Embracing new technology
•  Building new business models

Adjusting the organizational mindset (no small task) means aligning to rapidly changing customer needs. This means improving sales force effectiveness (i.e. making the sales rep the quarterback in the middle who is calling the number of a certain channel depending on preference), engaging Generation Y (i.e. striving to make the pharma experience match the non-pharma experience they’re familiar with or recognizing their “self-service” mentality) and utilizing digital functionality (i.e. doing micro-segmenting, personalizing content and maximizing spend).

Embracing new technology means picking a strategy before it picks you, McKines said. Interestingly, her first point here was to use social media to promote collaboration, steer conversation, listen to customers and respond quickly. Her second point was to leverage mobility (i.e. enable mobile content delivery to reach consumers in real time, support sales and training, and increase customer engagement). She also pointed out the importance of integrating channels (i.e. deliver one message across all channels).

Building new business models means shifting the internal (i.e. centralizing innovation, decentralizing localization, and prioritizing content) and shifting the external (i.e. using collective intelligence, investing in infrastructure and choosing the right partners).

Her session ended with a Q&A highlighted by a pointed comment from the audience in which an agency attendee said, “We can only innovate as fast as quickly as you can change.” McKines’ responded by saying, “I realize we are not always a fast and nimble partner, but that’s why we need partners, to push us to change.”

…

The next session I covered was a moderated panel discussion led by Liz Cernak, CCO of Pozen, based out of my college hometown of Chapel Hill, NC. Founded in 1996 and public since 2000, Pozen focuses primarily on drug development but is in the process of transitioning to a commercialized model and as a result put together a coterie of thought leaders to form its digital advisory board, including Raj Amin, CEO, Healthnation; Bonin Bough, Sr. Director of Digital and Social Media, PepsiCo; Marc Monsseau, Founder, MDM Communication; Daniel Palestrant, MD, Founder, Sermo, CEO and Founder, Par8o; and Meredith Ressi, President, Manhattan Research. Among the highlights (paraphrased unless in quotations):

Monsseau: The biggest challenge digital can help with from a marketing perspective is in heralding the shift from one-way to two-way communication and targeted approaches, while in sales, it presents a way of reaching physicians with more efficacy and reach. “At the end of day, you still have to have great content.” It needs to be resonating, actionable, and useful. Content that lives in digital now is dry, not what you want to watch or share. Opportunity exists to create content that people can take in, but can also start a conversation with, with a doc or someone else struggling with the disease. Ultimately, what’s needed is content that can improve health outcomes.

Bough: Set it and forget it is passé. Deep customer listening on top of real-time customer engagement is the way of the future. The quantified self (referencing Kevin Kelly’s talk) allows people to their own progression through their own healthcare, meaning pharma and healthcare need to adapt. Bough also provocatively stated that pharma is negligent if it is not listening to its consumers through social listening techniques, highlighting the difficulty in applying non-pharma perspectives to the risk-averse, highly regulated industry.

Palestrant: How can pharma use digital to better relationships with physicians? One way is through sophisticated sales and techniques that can amplify efficacy data. He also talked about how social media can cost-effectively communicate important messages to stakeholders in ways that speak to their own preferences for information consumption. Among the communication revolutions to date (including the printing press, broadcast, etc.), the digital age means that now the tail is wagging the dog.

Amin: Digital allows pharma to touch consumers in deeper ways across multiple platforms. Consumers see media differently as they get comfortable with new devices, so the industry needs to learn when to present content based on the disposition of the consumer. Are they lean back? Lean forward? On the go?

Ressi: Mobile is completely changing the game. Platform adoption metrics change under our feet. Understanding the way it changes how healthcare providers learn and gather info and how it changes service expectations is critical if the industry is to properly leverage the opportunity.

...

I attended the post-lunch (no monster reuben today, just a forkful or two of salad and a cookie… okay, two cookies) multichannel consumer marketing track hosted by Alison Woo, director of social media at BMS. She had Mark Bard of the Digital Health Coalition and Jack Barrette, CEO of Wego Health, up to discuss the recent FDA draft guidance on off-label communication. Among the quotes that really stood out to me was Barrette saying that “not looking for [adverse events] or not trying to look for them is an indefensible position.” This was borne out of a lively conversation between Bard and Barrette on the scope and impact of the narrow guidance and how it may impact the way in which pharma chooses to address its digital presences in light of misinformation correction, off-label comments and AEs.

Gregg Zagras and Jen Willey of RealAge presented a session on their product, which depending on your orientation might equally frighten or excite you. Their digital health assessment produces a score that represents your actual age as compared to your real age (i.e. a heavy drinker and smoker who is into red meat and couch surfing might in reality be several years older than their age). The tool allows individuals to chart a path toward better health while offering pharma clients the ability to position their products in front of highly aligned segments of the population. People with high cholesterol, for example, might be presented with statin drug ads while they progress through subsequent health evaluations beyond the original assessment. 

Willey and Zagras argue that brands need to consider their patient population before launch in order to optimize their marketing efforts. Obviously, one way to do so would be to partner with RealAge. For the curious, the site also offers the ability for individuals to learn what their sex age is. Insert your own joke here.

The last session of the track was a refreshing perspective from patient advocates Amy Gurowitz, Founder, MS SoftServe; Jeffrey Roberts, Founder, IBS Self Help and Support Group; and Max Szadek, Founder and Executive Director, Divabetic.

…

The last panel discussion of the day back in the main hall brought some of the industry’s most influential thought leaders in the digital space together to talk about future trends. Of all the great insights, my favorites revolved around how the industry should handle the challenge of working with Medical, Legal, Regulatory (MLR). Julie Holcombe, senior director, US Vaccines Marketing at Pfizer referenced the hilarious Kevin Nalty-produced video that aired this morning called “Fear Factor: Pharmaceuticals” in which MLR was presented in a less than flattering light. She said that video is what is wrong with marketers’ thinking. She said MLR and marketing need to be “frenemies to the end. … Their job is to keep us safe, and we’re walking a fine line between wanting to not get a letter” and still get the job done. Since “we as marketers are not going to regulate ourselves, … we may have to extend the olive branch.”

Joe Shields, head of global strategic marketing at LifeScan, said that MLR departments need a tune-up to ensure that they are not an operational bottleneck, but he also suggested a curious idea that to save money, time and resources, some pharma companies purposefully dial back MLR capacity to throttle back marketing output. I’m not sure what the industry thinks about this, but it certainly provoked a reaction on the #epharma tweetstream by agency and media thought leaders who found that idea troubling.

Peter Dannenfelser, director of North American digital marketing for Jannsen, said that the MLR issue raises two key points: the industry clearly needs to play in the space, but it also needs to do a much better job of communicating to consumers the rules that it has to play by, something that he thinks pharma could do a much better job of.

…

One of two Best in Show sessions was hosted by James Chase, editor in chief for MM&M, in which he discussed the GetToKnowC campaign launched by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Ignite Health that earned the top spot at the 2012 MM&M awards in the best disease/education website category. Brian Lefkowitz, chief creative officer at Ignite and Hugo Brown, associate director of marketing at Vertex joined Chase on stage to talk about the campaign and how it took shape. Brown said his company wanted to empower Hepatitis C patients while removing the stigma of the condition. Lefkowitz explained the way his agency created a multichannel campaign featuring deep, rich, informative content with the right tone. One feature of it that jumped out at me was the homepage, which opens with a creative segmentation feature, allowing visitors to choose the “person” that best represents where they are in the process of dealing with the disease.

…

So that’s a wrap from Day Two — looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow as we wrap up the 2012 ePharma Summit. I really hope that all this blogging is helping you attendees derive even more from what has so far been a rich conference experience for me. Please do forgive any egregious typos; a stenographer I am not. If we haven’t met yet, please do come introduce yourself and learn more about the benchmarking research and analysis that I do in the digital marketing space for my firm, Cutting Edge Information. You know where to find me: near a plug.

Day Two at #ePharma Summit, HCP Track

This is the first day of the “big” conference, but my second. If you want the play-by-play for today or yesterday, just read my notes at bit.ly/epharmasummit. Feel free to share that link around.

At the end of yesterday's sessions, I saw some trends emerging, most notably, segmentation/targeting and the twin specters of mobile and social. We saw a lot of tactics, which served a lot of people very well (judging from the twitterverse response), and a lot of data to help people like me make better decisions in the future.

Today was a very different day. Today was a macro level view as opposed to a more micro-tactical view. The discussions centered on broad strokes and ideas, hints as to what the future of pharma marketing holds.

Here’s what I will be taking away form today’s conference:

One, pharma has been in a transition period for a long time now. How long have we been calling this “the year of mobile” or “the year of social”? Three years? Can we stop the buzz-word bingo? Speaking at a macro level doesn't mean glazing over deep truths, it means getting to the heart of the matter and distilling what’s true. Can we call a moratorium on pointing to mobile as a hot new channel? I've had an iPhone for four years (and I missed the first generation). Clearly, mobile isn't a new channel, it's just a channel. Same with social. Same with games. Next year, you’ll just sound like someone who still says “hotlinks” and “information superhighway.” You really don't want to be that person. Do you want to know who’s succeeding? People with a genuine sense of humor and dedication to solving problems. Some people seem to be more interested at cataloging the reasons to lament the future, to pooh-pooh what we all know is coming. Do you want to work with them? All problems are solvable, they just need to be broken down into pieces and dealt with.  Telling us not to be too focused on tactics or getting more focused on tactics isn't as useful as understanding when and where a tactic might be useful.

That's the same telling us all to be more strategic. You might as well tell us to be smarter or not to be too smart. The same goes for saying I should target and segment and track and analyze. That I should focus on the customer, that I should focus on what worked, that I should create efficiencies. Got it. Agree. Highly agree. Cannot agree enough... But we all already agreed when we signed up. What else? Find the golden nugget of truth and deliver it with the help of examples and data.

This is the world of multi-channel marketing, but are we living in a world of multi-channel analytics, where we measure each channel independently but also in conjunction with all the other tactics. Who among is is really doing this right now? Are we too busy arguing that this channel is better than that channel? Or kvetching that MLR is complicated (in other breaking news, many people use Facebook, budgets are getting squeezed, HCPs like iPads, and puppies are cute)?  William Gibson once said “the future is now, it just isn't widely distributed yet.”

That phrase came to me during the session on Quantitive Self, as I realized that the tools and ideas to do everything was already in all of our hands. It just isn't widely distributed because people refuse to see the value. This isn't a shot to those who disagree, as we are all strong with more opposing viewpoints. I was struck by how some voices dismissed the QS out of hand, as if it were threatening and scary. There’s no difference between what was said in the session and diabetic who measure their glucose every few hours, or the person who watches their caloric intake, or the person keeping track of their bench press. The bitter rejection smacks of fear and denial. And I know the people in my rooms are smarter than that.

Here’s what I didn't hear much of that I wish I had: Lifetime value of a customer. Two different people outside the events brought this concept up independently to me, and only one person even hinted at the concept’s existence. We are getting too focused on the efficacy of this tactic today versus that tactic yesterday that we miss that everything we do should be in service of the goal of understanding our customer in both the short and long term. Without that understanding, we are in danger of becoming the Crazy Eddie of marketing, shouting whatever it takes to get someone to prescribe. Is that the game you really want to play? Relationship Marketing. In attempting to understand our customer, we build a relationship with that customer. Even when we fail to understand them, the relationship exists, however dysfunctional and flawed. Why do we continue to pretend that this isn't true? It won't do pharma any good to stick its head in the sand and pretend that relationships can be solved by mobile or social (a medium it still isn't comfortable in). We must face the issue head on, plan and execute marketing that fosters relationships we want to be in. And while I appreciate a fresh point of view, a point of view uncluttered with even a basic understanding of the day-to-day realities didn't do me (or many others, based on the twitter response) any good.

Especially if the resulting advice is to “change faster” and “fail harder.” I don't disagree, but I'm not blind to the facts on the ground.  Far Better was the panel which discussed (among many other things) MRL on a level that I hadn't considered before. MRL isn't the enemy; they are partners we haven't brought into the fold yet, just as we haven't taken the time to learn what they can teach us. I will admit that my brain is pudding. I will be taking notes tomorrow, but since I'm traveling home, I'm not sure when I'll be posting my blog. Maybe Thursday. So enjoy the notes, and keep the twitter back channel going!