Agency perspectives on interactive and social media	November 2007

by Gina-Louise Monari

As the marketing and advertising needs of the pharmaceutical company evolves, so must the role of pharmaceutical advertising agencies. Interactive agencies such as Cadient Group, Compass Healthcare Communications, and Avenue A | Razorfish are providing new solutions to reach clients’ goals while monitoring consumer behaviors and measuring effectiveness.

Cadient wants every brand to active monitoring social media. The agency incorporates monitoring into metric reporting, which includes keywords and phrases in campaigns being picked up in blogs, as well as the monitoring of traffic volume for brands.

“Monitoring has no risk to it; it’s the safest thing you can do and allows you to prepare for any of the negative consequences out there,” says William Reese, chief innovation officer, Cadient Group (cadient.com).

Monitoring provides insights similar to market research that can then be validated through a formal research process. For some of the agency’s innovative brands, Cadient has created social media programs.

“For certain brands, the patient population is perfect for social media,” Mr. Reese told Med Ad News. “They are very community-based, especially for stigmatized conditions — we’ve found that for the conditions that have a lot of myths about them, people are turning to social media to dispel some of those myths.”

The lack of participation by the industry in social media is the result of clients’ perception that social media is a fad or a gimmick. Social media, however, is bringing the Internet back to its original roots and purpose, which was to share information and be a collaborative force between groups — originally, universities. Although social media channels themselves are nothing new, they are becoming more user friendly, with channels opening up to the masses.

According to Mr. Reese, the faster the pharmaceutical companies are educated about the realities of what the technology is and the impact it has on their patient and professional base, the easier it will be for these companies to adopt the technologies appropriately. Mr. Reese believes that the best practice of marketing is creating a strong brand. The strategic planning of a brand must take into consideration how a brand will extend itself and how research and messages will be translated into the online space. Traditional advertising agencies need to understand that the brand now has to live across many mediums.

“[Social media] will actually be a great thing overall for [agencies] because it will force brands to focus on core messages and a lot stronger, simpler messages that have impact versus forcing three or five messages and trying to get so much information into a consumer’s hand,” Mr. Reese told Med Ad News. “It can be one of the best tools that both online and offline agencies can leverage in the coming year.”

The safest form of social media includes the dissemination of information via video, audio, and Podcasts. Video is among the most controlled medium, which is a content package that is easy to review through a regulatory process. According to Mr. Reese, the content can be passed from person to person, but it is not going to be altered or changed in any way. Blogs, however, have a fairly high degree of risk because they cannot be controlled, with the exception of the specific topics that arise in discussions as well as the level of education that is provided to the advocate, the key opinion leaders, and citizen journalists who write the blogs.

“You can actually go out to them and, similar to the way that you do a press briefing in the PR sense, you can do that same kind of approach with the blog writer and treat them like a citizen journalist and at least inform them and give them that press packet of the right facts,” Mr. Reese says. “It’ll be their choice with how they take those facts, but you’ve at least enabled them.”

In addition to creating social media programs, such as Novartis’ (novartis.com) FluFlix video contest, Cadient trains patient advocates in using social media. This is because many brands are beginning to engage patient advocates.

“We’re not necessarily training them on the brand message; instead we’re training them that the technology exists,” Mr. Reese says. “Then it is up to them on the types of topics that they are talking about. In a lot of cases we find that just creating the opportunity for people to discuss and have the debate … is good for the overall category.”

Health-care specific communities and segment- and audience-specific communities are emerging. According to Mr. Reese, as technology develops, more communities will begin to leverage tagging, which can be powerful in the healthcare arena. Patient insights can be observed and companies can begin to understand how consumers are leveraging articles and the messages online.

Another trend is the push toward transparency in the coming year. If pharmaceutical companies are willing to embrace transparency, social media is a positive venue.

“Education in a social media world will be able to spread on its own,” Mr. Reese says. “The higher quality education, the higher quality experiences that pharmaceutical companies provide, are going to be what people will write about in social media.”

Compass Healthcare Communications offers an approach to help clients jumpstart Internet marketing efforts. The agency’s None-to-One approach ensures companies overcome some of the internal barriers that prevent companies from fully realizing the potential of the Internet as a marketing tool, including questions about regulatory compliance and measuring return on investment. The end result is the creation of an online ready organization that is able to establish measurable online marketing programs that are customized to strategic goals.

As the name implies, the None-to-One approach enables companies that are less experienced with online marketing tactics — or only use them on a limited basis — to have effective, measurable online campaigns complementing and supplementing their offline marketing efforts. It begins with an educational module on assessing needs, setting priorities, and establishing measurement criteria for the program. Using the None-to-One approach, companies can avoid many of the difficulties of launching a new online marketing program, including compliance with FDA marketing standards.

“Pharmaceutical and health-care companies typically must communicate complex clinical material to multiple audiences,” says Peter H. Nalen, president and CEO, Compass Healthcare Communications (compasshc.com). “We at Compass have found that the Internet is a great marketing tool to reach and educate each one of these audiences. Yet many healthcare companies simply don’t know the best way to integrate the Internet into their marketing programs.”

Compass, as an experienced marketer exclusively supporting brands in the healthcare industry, understands the intricacies of medical regulatory and legal requirements.

“The healthcare industry has lagged behind other major sectors in fully integrating the Internet into its marketing mix,” Mr. Nalen says. “Concerns about regulatory compliance have in the past made pharma med/reg/legal departments wary of the Internet. But it is generally accepted that the same rules regarding mislabeling and misbranding that affect traditional forms of professional or DTC communication apply to interactive technology, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not developed specific guidelines or regulations for the Internet.”

The None-to-One approach addresses all online marketing initiatives, such as: Websites and the online media programs that drive traffic to them, including banner ads, paid and organic search engine marketing; healthcare provider programs such as e-detailing, which provides medical information for physicians to review online, password protected KOL Extranet sites, and other educational programs; and multi-channel CRM marketing programs that include e-mail, e-newsletters, text messaging, and other tools to increase contact with target audiences.

“Ultimately, the success of any marketing program must be gauged on its ability to identify, acquire, convert, and retain target audiences,” Mr. Nalen says. “With None to One, clients can access the power of the Internet very, very quickly.”

In May, Avenue A | Razorfish launched a custom reporting solution to optimize rich Internet applications, which is aimed at quantifying effectiveness of Web campaigns. Avenue A / Razorfish’s RIAx is a flexible reporting solution that informs marketers how consumers are engaging with rich Internet applications online, including media, microsites, and Websites.

RIAx uses a combination of insights and technology to analyze, measure, and optimize media performance. To date, more than 40 implementations of RIAx have been completed for a range of clients across different industries and business verticals.

Rich Internet applications are being widely used in the industry, rendering many traditional Web metrics irrelevant. For example, the concept of a page view has weakened as many rich Internet applications provide a more comprehensive user experience within a single Web page. Through tagging technology, the RIAx solution resolves the issue by providing the flexibility to track complex interactions enabled through rich Internet applications, such as mouse-overs, hovers, and video interaction.

Designers and developers are taking advantage of the increased flexibility of rich Internet applications by creating new ways for consumers to engage with the Internet. Each implementation presents unique challenges in determining what behaviors to track and how to glean insight into whether the rich Internet application is influencing a consumer. The RIAx solution combines the technology to generate metrics, collect data on a wide array of behaviors, and optimize the rich Internet application for better performance.

“Our clients hold digital media to a higher standard,” says Lee Sherman, senior VP, global solutions, Avenue A | Razorfish (avenuea-razorfish.com). “They demand to know whether their media, microsites, and Websites are delivering a great brand experience and a return on investment. If existing technologies and metrics don’t meet our clients’ needs, then it’s our job to invent a solution that does.”

In addition to the adaptive tagging technology, Avenue A | Razorfish has integrated survey technology to collect attitude-based information from the consumer about their online experience. With that insight, more detail can be provided about specific interactions that drove brand favorability or intent to purchase, and marketers can use that information to optimize a Website. Another important feature of RIAx is the seamless integration between media data and Website data. The benefit to marketers is that they can optimize media campaigns to achieve superior engagement with a rich Internet Website.

Avenue A | Razorfish executives work with clients to determine the specific goals that are accomplished by using rich Internet applications and to provide direction on tracking implementation to ensure the results match the business goals. The RIAx technology is then configured by Avenue A | Razorfish to report on the precise metrics and views defined by the client and analyst. Avenue A | Razorfish collects the Web data and provides a dashboard along with recommendations on how to optimize the rich Internet application or media campaign to better meet the marketing goals..

“Marketers are deploying a new generation of Websites that require new technologies and approaches to measurement and optimization,” Mr. Sherman says. “We need to re-think what we measure; we need to be smarter about the relationship between those interactions and the ultimate marketing objective; and we need to accelerate how we act on those insights to optimize the online experience.”