Digital Media is playing a greater role in today’s communication with healthcare professionals. IMI has extensive experience in using digital media to inform and educate and can provide partnership opportunities to work with clients to offer unique and engaging digital media solutions.

Digital media to support your marketing and communication strategies

E-alerts> delivered by email, high quality content supports key brand message, direct delivery, trackable, cost effective

E-Details> delivered via electronic media, important product related information and clinical information, multimedia, ability to add value to face to face meetings

Medical Meetings & Advisory Board Meetings> provide technology solutions to capture important meetings, offer modules on MedicalCPD.com site for future use for healthcare professionals or internal employees

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As the Pharmaceutical Industry continues to follow its inevitable route to market consolidation, take over and acquisition, the next round of budget cuts is just around the corner. Depending on what sector of the supply chain to this industry you are in this can be a good thing or a bad omen. Certainly the rise in the influence of medico / legal departments on marketing campaigns over the last decade led many to believe that the days of the imaginative marketing campaign were at an end. The restrictions on the promotional items budget added to the atmosphere of stagnation and a straight jacket approach to marketing.

Then came digital marketing!

I am old enough to remember and to have worked in and through the first .com bubble. In the heady days of the 90s, individuals and companies scrambled to purchase the most creative URLs following the mantra that “if you build it they will come.” Traffic was seen as the key to success, and sites that generated large volumes of traffic were traded for huge sums, despite accumulating massive costs and losses. As we all now know, the bubble burst as business common sense started to take hold and an ROI approach to this new www phenomenon started to take hold. During times of boom and bust, it is usually the companies that are large enough to hang around long enough to pick up the pieces, that go on to become a huge success. These companies often evolve their strategy or business plan to take advantage of the “new” landscape and often go on to become major players in their field.
So what have we learnt if anything from those rollercoaster times and can we apply lessons to the current digital age.

Access and sales force
Access to GPs and healthcare professionals has always been one of the main ways that the “message” is communicated, as we all know access to our main customers is becoming increasingly difficult. The digital purists will state that the technology can overcome this and even replace the current model of the sales person. The old school will tell you there is still value in face to face meetings and building relationships. But what happens when you can’t eyeball your HCP and build that relationship or when your ‘super rep’ leaves for the competition. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal picked up this theme stated that “Tens of thousands of pharmaceutical sales reps have been eliminated in the U.S., creating a void that drug makers are now increasingly filling with websites, iPad apps and other digital tools to interact with doctors who prescribe their treatments”. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703702004576268772294316518.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews

A trend has started in the US where some of the major players in the industry have started to decrease their sales force and are experimenting with new digital marketing tools. Sanofi-Aventis is using http://www.ipractice.com, AstraZeneca has on offer Touchpoints, while Merck & Co. has http://www.merckservices.com – all these services offer information accessible 24×7 over the internet
From a financial directors point of view investigating a digital approach makes sense.
There is no problem with the reduced surgery/doctor interaction time. There are obvious savings in reducing the substantial costs of training, developing and maintaining a sales force. Some would argue that it also offers a better way of presenting information as the message does not get diluted or ‘spun’. Messages are consistent and compliant because they are delivered the same way each and every time and a single iPad app can contain the entire company’s portfolio of drug information.
Strap line…[Digital Marketing] could revolutionise the communications mix - and for finance directors it could be the key to saving 20% of the marketing budget without any drop in results. …Source: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com, published Aug 2009
Strap line: Email newsletters are probably the single highest ROI action to improve online presence 65% forward newsletters
Source: Jakob Nielsen

Technology, Gadgets and Content
It is easy to see why a digital approach makes sense, particularly as HCPs have been embracing technology more and more in recent years. The availability of smart phones, websites, iPad apps and other digital tools are ever increasing and offer a convenient solution that enables pharma companies to get more content (not just the detail aid) – in front of doctors who prescribe their treatments.
This is an area where big mistakes can be made however. Many of the common mistakes made by early adopters to this technology have concentrated on the technology and gadgetry rather than the content and channel. We recently became the distribution channel (Opt-In email database) for a project devised to raise awareness of a disease. In the past we have had a lot of success in segmenting our database and providing subscribers with information they value. The project was completely non-promotional and involved the HCP interacting with a ship docking at several ports where the information could be accessed. The presentation was child-like and more akin to an early learning pre-school module. My eight year old was bored in less than two minutes. The agency were astounded when the CTR was almost non-existent.
Another agency asked us to become involved in a project that would drive traffic to their web site. When we get this type of request it sets alarm bells ringing! It usually means that the project has been poorly planned with minimal use of focus groups, customer interaction or no planning for contingency or communication. ‘If we build it, they will come’ did not work in the 90s and it doesn’t work now.
The thing that is most depressing about such approaches is that the people concerned would not approach a traditional marketing campaign in such a way. The company has taken the big step to embrace digital marketing and has been let down. The resulting failure of such projects makes it more difficult for experts in the field to get customers to engage in digital marketing. It creates suspicion amongst the old school that the new way of doings things is a fad not to be trusted.
The old saying has never had more brevity, CONTENT WAS KING, IS KING AND WILL ALWAYS BE KING!!

There are signs that this is gradually being taken on broad by the Pharmaceutical Industry. Many Pharmaceutical companies have excellent web sites filled with amazing multi-media content, in most cases traffic is low or has not reached the levels hoped for in the marketing plan. This is usually due to a failure in integrating their digital and traditional marketing campaigns. They have not adopted the principle that 2+2=5 when you combine media.

Communities
The marketers will tell you that it is all about building online communities and conversing with them, providing good quality content and interacting with your potential customers.
It is also important to realise that HCPs have no real interest in becoming part of a community that is sponsored by a Pharma company. A much better route would be to form alliances with third parties and provide the information through independent channels. Choose channels that have positive opt-ins for specific information in their therapy area. In this way your CTR and interaction are likely to be much higher. But remember the content has to be right! Choose channels that are not overused otherwise email fatigue can set in and the response will be poor. In the same way that you would not use a creative agency that is working with your main competitor, why would you share a channel with them!
Strap line: Any segmentation increases clicks by 70% Source: MarketingSherpa.Q4 2010
Strap line: The top five stories were read by at least 62% of doctors receiving the publication and the top ten stories were read by at least 40%. Diabetes.MED stats 2011

Video: HCPs are consumers like the rest of us and assuming they react differently to the trends in digital technology is clearly nonsense. The incredible rise in online video, YouTube should not be ignored.
YouTube stats TABLE
• 13 million: Number of hours of video that were uploaded in 2010.
• 60 days > 60 years: More video is uploaded in two months than the three major U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) combined created in six decades.
• 30 percent: Amount of overall traffic coming from the U.S. YouTube is localized in 25 countries and 43 languages.
• 700 billion: Number of playbacks in 2010.
• 10,000: Number of partners, hundreds of which make six figures a year.
• More than 7,000: Number of hours of full-length movies and shows.
• 2 billion: Number of global video views per week being monetized.
• 10 percent: Amount of videos available in HD.
• 100 years: Amount of video scanned daily by Content ID, which is used by more than 1,000 partners, including every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label.
• 4 million: Number of people connected and auto-sharing to at least one social network.
• 100 million: Number of daily mobile views.

Video detailing offers a rich multi-media experience that fits in with a HCPs needs for depth of detail while offering the convenience of being able to consume content on their own terms. The site NovoMedLink and Alcon’s new “eyepad” app features high quality video and shows off their educational modules to a very high standard. The saying ‘An educated doctor is a prescribing doctor’ has never been more true whether the education be from a sales visit, a conference or an online video, it makes no difference.

Mobile: Reference databases such as International Drug Reference IDR, online journals and dosage calculators are now within fingertip reach and delivered in an attention getting interactive format. HCPs can get the education they need without making multiple calls to their drug information pharmacist or sacrificing valuable patient time.

ROI or RIP?
It appears that there are currently two schools of thought within pharmaceutical marketing, on the right is the view that every digital action should be put under the scrutiny of an ROI assessment, because we can measure it we have to make it profitable, the other view on the left is that digital marketing is no more than an extension of the marketing mix. We don’t measure ROI of all the marketing elements of the campaign so why should we do so with digital?
I confess that much like my political views; I am somewhere left of centre on this argument. Of course digital campaigns should be fully integrated into the marketing mix. The days when we no longer have digital leads or digital agencies, will be the day that the industry has fully embraced and understood this concept, but we are a few years away from that! One of the strengths of using digital platforms is that it provides a metric that can be used to measure performance against objectives (key performance indicators KPIs etc). It is also important to realise that it is very difficult to disentangle one marketing activity from others and thus I believe a proper ROI assessment is often unrealistic. Maybe we should create a new term ‘ROE’ return on e-vestment, that measures what can be measured and use these as key performance indicators.
EXCEPTION! We recently completed a project in the Netherlands for the GP market. The exercise was to highlight the re-introduction of a product after 4 years of absence from the market. There was no sales force and no marketing activity during this time. In economics theory this would be described as a naïve perfect market. The objective was to educate GPs about the disease area and to highlight the availability and attributes of the product to treat the disease. A web site was produced that met the educational objectives and a direct mail campaign with an integrated usb web key was used to drive GPs to the web site. The results showed that 35% of the GPs used the web key in the first 8 weeks and the sales of the product grew 22% during this period, producing excellent sales for the region. Good ROI / ROE from good integration of two marketing activities! The successful campaign has now been translated and rolled out to two other markets.
Digital Marketing is now an everyday part of the marketing mix the challenge is to seamlessly integrate the activities so it becomes part of the solution not part of an internal problem.
Sumary box
1. Regulatory conditions present new challenges in pharmaceutical marketing
2. Digital communication can help fill the void of options now closed to marketers
3. Opportunities for digital marketing have never been better BUT
4. Getting the message right and targeting the audience is paramount
5. Make sure the content is relevant to achieve good ROI
6. Content developed with third parties will have more impact than communication sent directly from big pharma HQ
7. Try not to view digital as a separate entity to be assessed solely on its own merit but integral to the marketing mix
8. Be careful to put any feedback from digital campaigns into context with other activities

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