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.
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