closerlook 2015
closerlook inc.
212 W. Superior Street, Suite 300
Chicago, IL 60654
Telephone: 312-640-3700
Website: closerlook.com
SERVICES MIX
Digital 70%
Strategy 15%
Video 10%
Print 5%
According to closerlook executives, the pharmaceutical industry’s “one-message-fits-all” approach to promotion and sales continues to become relatively less effective and more expensive. Despite the rise of digital marketing, relationship marketing, and non-personal promotion in general, many pharmaceutical companies are still wondering if their initial forays into this “new” world will pay off. Lacking the right guidance, many will simply continue current strategies and tactics rather than adapt to change. But there is a smarter way.
Its leaders say closerlook is a digital marketing agency that helps pharmaceutical marketers build better relationships with their best customers. The agency believes the answer to more effective and efficient marketing lies in the symbiotic relationship between customer intelligence and customer access. To help clients practice smarter marketing, closerlook develops offerings that both increase intelligence – through new technology, data collection, in-depth analysis and timely reporting – and broaden access to customers through responsive, content-rich campaigns that are integrated across a wide range of channels.
Through the right combination of strategy, creative, analytics, technology and client service – executives say closerlook is uniquely positioned to help its clients tie it all together.
The year’s accomplishments
According to agency leadership, 2014 was characterized by continued investment in closerlook’s intelligence capabilities, including expanding the strategy and analytics teams.
Pete Clancy, VP, strategy, is guiding the development and ongoing expansion of the agency’s strategy team. In this expanded role, he is helping the agency’s clients identify unique market opportunities, challenges and needs, and match those circumstances with unique relationship marketing (RM) solutions.
Supporting efforts to understand the behavior, preferences and growth potential of HCPs, executives say closerlook is also evolving its analytics capabilities and developing product offerings that deliver relevant, actionable insight to clients.
closerlook’s 2014 portfolio reflects achievements across all stages of the brand life cycle, completing projects for pre-launch, launch and mature brands in both primary and specialty care markets including diabetes, mental health, rheumatology, gastroenterology, cardiovascular health, sleep disorders, wound care, urology and oncology.
In one pre-launch campaign, closerlook executives claim that more than 90 percent of target HCPs were reached, with 5.7 average engagements per HCP in the first six months, 450 percent more prescriptions written six months after the launch of the product by HCPs who received at least one communication than those HCPs who did not engage, and 544 percent more prescriptions written by HCPs who registered for future communication during pre-launch than those who did not.
Structure and services offered
Executives say to deliver on its promise of greater customer intelligence and access, closerlook cultivates a highly collaborative culture and work ethic where experts in strategy, analytics, creative, technology and client service work together to deliver a range of technology-enabled offerings.
These offerings include the Backstage Relationship Marketing Technology Suite; Target Clarity HCP Adoption Analysis; healthcare professional and patient websites; awareness and acquisition campaigns; interactive sales aids (ISAs); interactive articles; method of action (MOA) and method of disease (MOD) animations; and mobile applications.
The Backstage Relationship Marketing Technology Suite helps clients manage their RM efforts with data-driven insight and action, executives say. Data management and integration is handled by Backstage CRM, while Backstage Web offers clients a rapidly deployable, feature-rich framework for building responsive HCP websites. To open the lines of communication between sales and marketing, Backstage Rep Connect feeds valuable customer-level marketing interaction data to sales representatives in the field.
Target Clarity offers insight into the capacity of individual HCPs to prescribe a particular product, placing them in distinct groups of increasing brand awareness based on a mix of predictive modeling and behavioral and demographic factors. By arming marketers with insight about which targets to grow, maintain or divest from, this advanced research approach helps encourage growth, increase brand loyalty and prevent sales loss.
closerlook builds robust, responsive websites that offer easy access to HCPs and patients. The underlying framework is relationship marketing-enabled, whether for pre-launch brands to establish a clinical need, branded HCP portals to personalize clinical and promotional content, or patient-facing branded and unbranded websites designed to respond to consumer needs.
Customer acquisition begins with awareness. closerlook develops multi-channel campaigns that allow marketers to find their customers and move them toward greater commitment by providing increasingly relevant content as they get to know those targets.
Executives say closerlook’s ISAs take sales force interactions further by customizing the individual HCP’s brand experience and personalizing sales representatives’ conversations, messages and tracking capabilities.
closerlook creates immersive interactive articles that engage users through a blend of video, animation and data visualization to present brand messaging in novel ways. Each action – whether on scroll or click – is tracked to the individual HCP to accurately measure the level of engagement and interest in key brand messages.
The video animation team at closerlook produces high-tech scenic environments, 3D medical animations, and original music scores that create immersive experiences for HCPs and patients.
Increased access and communication between patients and physicians can lead to improved patient care and outcomes. closerlook’s app dev team develops custom mobile applications that support both sides of the HCP-patient relationship.
Future plans
Smarter marketing means gathering intelligence, identifying new opportunities and producing practical innovation in a changing industry. Executives say closerlook is focused on what marketing needs to look like in that dynamic “new world,” where healthcare payers, accountable care organizations (ACOs), integrated provider networks, physicians and patients all influence how pharma is bought and sold.
Philanthropy/citizenship
In 2014, the closerlook team maintained an active role in local and global efforts to improve the social, economic and physical health of communities, executives say.
closerlook partnered with the Chicago chapter of Urban Alliance, employing and mentoring an intern throughout her senior year of high school, and was the lead gala sponsor for Upwardly Global, which aims to eliminate employment barriers for skilled immigrants and refugees.
CEO David Ormesher continues his leadership of Bigger Future, a nonprofit business and leadership-training program based in Rwanda, and serves on several boards including the XPRIZE Foundation, physIQ, the Lurie Children’s Hospital Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Ormesher is additionally one of six recipients of the Red Jacket Award, given by the editors of PharmaVOICE magazine, to individuals who have significantly helped transform the legacy of the healthcare environment now and in the future.
