CMI/Compas
2200 Renaissance Blvd.
Suite 160
King of Prussia, PA 19406
Telephone
484-322-0880
E-mail
[email protected]
Website
cmicompas.com
Quick Facts
Accounts
Account wins 6
Active business clients (at parent level) 41
Brands by 2018 sales
Brand-product accounts held 480
Services mix
Full service non-personal promotion, planning, and buying and investment 87%
Data and customer insights 13%
Client roster
Abbott
AbbVie
Acadia Pharmaceuticals
Adamas Pharmaceuticals
Agios Pharmaceuticals
Amgen
Astellas
AstraZeneca
Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals
Boehringer Ingelheim
Boston Scientific
Celgene
Clovis Oncology
Dova Pharmaceuticals
Dynavax
Eli Lilly
Endo Pharmaceuticals
Exelixis
Fresenius
Genentech
GlaxoSmithKline
Johnson & Johnson
LifeScan
LivaNova
Novartis/Alcon
Otsuka America Pharmaceutical
Pharmacyclics
Sanofi
Seattle Genetics
Shire
Sunovion
Verastem
2018 was a pivotal year for artificial intelligence and big data, and CMI/Compas led the charge to bring the benefits of this futuristic technology to pharma brands, according to management. As the agency continued its mission to be the indispensable partner to pharma, CMI/Compas prioritizes audience engagement – particularly utilizing company-created technology – to help clients better engage their hard-to-capture target audiences across HCPs, consumers, and caregivers. According to agency leaders, a big part of that was introducing artificial intelligence techniques to make better use of marketing data.
CMI/Compas takes a bold approach: taking on full accountability for clients’ success, management says. The agency’s goals are its clients’ goals, and this approach has paid off, with both organic and new business booming and client satisfaction steadily high. “We have been able to break through to our clients’ audiences in a way no one else has, and frankly it’s because we don’t always bow to convention,” says CEO Stan Woodland. “If there’s not a way to do it, we create a way. Our clients are our number one priority and we have assembled the best team and resources to make sure they reach their goals.”
Recent accomplishments
Steady and consistent growth has continued for CMI/Compas, which according to agency leaders, has become the go-to strategic media partner for a significant portion of the industry. Rather than simply executing media buys, the company uses a mix of proprietary technology and highly skilled staff to help clients target key audiences often to the individual level,” CMI/Compas executives say.
Management cites the agency’s upward trajectory of growth, which has been steady as it nears its 30th anniversary, continued with the winning of several competitive RFPs and an industry-leading client retention rate, which has allowed CMI/Compas to sustain double-digit annual revenue growth over the last several years. This has allowed the company to build its superstar ranks, with employee growth mirroring that of revenue, including hires at every level across the organization. A major step the company has been making to ensure this success was the early-2019 restructuring of the leadership team, which included appointing Dr. Susan Dorfman as president of CMI and John Donovan as president of Compas, in addition to several other high-level appointments. Changes also included the addition of a specialized strategy group within media focusing on making sure client deliverables are meeting the organization’s strategic standards. This change will better position the company to sustainably grow.
The data-centered approach extends to the many proprietary solutions CMI/Compas offers clients, ranging from consumer to HCP audiences. ADAPT is the CMI/Compas proprietary method of planning, which places the focus on agile, data-driven audience centricity. ADAPT planning starts with a deep dive into a client’s audience to fully understand wants, needs, and access of every audience member. Armed with this information, the planning teams are able to create the most engaging, efficient, and cost-effective targeted non-personal promotional recommendations that produce high ROI. Several proprietary offerings make ADAPT possible, including Media Vitals.
Management says a key aspect to understanding the consumer journey is ByConsumer, a data and technology platform built with privacy in mind for customer universe identification, segmentation, media planning, activation, and campaign measurement. According to agency leaders, “CMI/Compas’ in-depth knowledge of consumers, the media landscape, measurement, and customer-specific analytics allow us to create seamless multi-channel marketing campaigns for our clients, yielding superior customer experience and incremental positive ROI as a result.” ByConsumer joins ByDoctor under the company’s ByTarget suite of services.
Utilizing its Media Vitals research in combination with ByDoctor HCP-level data, CMI/Compas also knows which media channels HCPs are most likely to engage with, according to the company. That enables the agency to project a probability of exposure, which impacts awareness and ultimately helps influence HCP behavior. By forecasting these changes to Rx writing, the company can provide a range of incremental awareness, revenue, profit, or ROI that the brand can potentially get from NPP investments. This allows CMI/Compas to adjust budget allocation by channel in order to garner the highest returns based on brand goals. The company can also adjust the media allocation to concentrate on the most effective channels for each segment and have a greater focus on segments deemed most valuable to a brand.
Agency executives say 2018 saw enormous growth and success for Drive, CMI/Compas’ search and social offering. Highlights included several industry firsts, including the first-ever pharma campaign with Reddit. Drive takes an audience-centric approach and utilizes insights to create advertisements audiences actually want to see. By using search and social listening data to fuel strategy, CMI/Compas helped clients engage patients, caregivers and physicians in new and innovative ways, helping drive more engagement for brands across all platforms.
CMI/Compas was the first healthcare agency to introduce programmatic buying to the HCP space with AdMission, according to agency executives, and this innovation has allowed clients to more efficiently reach their targeted HCPs, increase transparency into their audiences, and improve business results. On a daily basis, CMI/Compas drives nearly two-thirds of the life science industry’s multi-channel professional media traffic and spend.
STRUCTURE AND SERVICES
CMI/Compas is structured to address the challenges and core needs of its customers, prospects and supplier partners – enabling the integrated full-service suite of offerings to its clients or stand-alone solutions for those who need them most, agency executives say. Services include strategic media/promotional planning and buying; promotional execution and investment management/buying consortium services; content planning; global reprints; customer insights and analytics; supplier alliance management; primary market research; SEO/SEM; and social listening and advertising.
The agency’s proprietary technology and solutions include ByTarget: ByDoctor and ByConsumer; Media Vitals; performance-based compensation models (Own the Audience and Compas Media Buying); AdMission (programmatic); and PROACT (CXM).
Agency leadership says Compas, the buying arm, is the only standalone media buying entity that leverages the total professional media spend of its clients with strong longstanding supplier partnerships and provides savings returns, in addition to the benefits of prime placements, publisher firsts and exclusives, and more, all from a Tier 1 NMSDC certified diverse supplier. Planning arm CMI is a WPP Health company.
FUTURE PLANS
Last year, the company shared that it would be expanding their artificial intelligence and triggered marketing tools. Just a few months later, it piloted both Solomon, the AI solution, and PROACT, the triggered marketing solution, with select clients. This bold initiative resulted in incredible client results and industry awards for both products.
“One of the biggest complaints about advertising is that it is intrusive,” agnecy executives say. “Our industry wants to move from selling to service. CMI/Compas created PROACT, customer experience management (CXM) tools that combine art and science to reach audiences when they want to be reached with the messages they value – all in a seamless “choose your own adventure” style that feels natural and welcomed by the audience.”
According to management, an iterative process flow is used for integration of CXM/marketing into a cohesive and flexible series of tactics that react to where customers are in their journey and the information they need to service their patients. A variety of analytical tools are used to determine the right frequency and message based on understanding of audience and desired outcomes, and a message matrix is developed that details what messages will be required for various segments and what is currently available. Historical activity and engagement data helps to understand the optimal frequency at the individual and channel levels.
As part of this, CMI/Compas developed a suite of tools called Solomon, which greatly aids in the planning process to right-size and efficiently spend brands’ investment, as well as to set specific exposure, awareness, ROI and revenue based goals. Initial goal setting is done by accounting for various audience, market, message and brand factors. Once these goals are set, CMI/Compas’ Media Mix Channel Optimizer allows the agency to optimize clients’ NPP spend against their business goals. This tool, along with years of media expertise and market research, enhances media plans by looking at the probability a HCP will engage with a specific media channel and the historical impact the channel has on Rx behavior. Using optimized NPP spend CMI/Compas is able to project expected changes in awareness based on factors such as audience size, recall, exposures and channel investment.
With the success of both pilots, 2019 will see PROACT and Solomon used in many more CMI/Compas client campaigns, agency leaders say.
Talent acquisition and staff development is more important than ever to support CMI/Compas’ continued growth, according to the leadership team, and the company has increased its already-significant investment in both areas with additional dedicated staff to the recruiting and development departments. The company invests in the learning and development of each employee, with job-specific training and development plans tailored to their career path. CMI/Compas continues to invest in benefits and initiatives that enrich and support the positive employee culture. This includes, in early 2019, opening its first West Coast office in Costa Mesa, Calif.
PHILANTHROPY/CITIZENSHIP
Brilliant Minds. Big Hearts. Bold Opportunities.” According to agency leaders, this is the mantra that CMI/Compas employees have taken on to describe what makes CMI/Compas unique. “Giving back to the community is a major focus for CMI/Compas,” agency executives say. “The organization and its employees hold philanthropy as a core value and hold a dedicated philanthropy-focused effort each month.”
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day each year, all employees can take the day to volunteer in the community. The longest-running philanthropic initiative is the holiday Adopt-A-Family program, and the 2018 program benefited the most families to date, providing toys, winter coats and other important items to dozens of families in need. All employees worked together to donate time and money, with the company matching employee donations.
CMI/Compas was one of the first sponsors of Cristo Rey High School in Philadelphia, an independent college preparatory school for students who could not otherwise afford a quality education. The company employs four students and pays the majority of their tuition, allowing them to gain not just an education but also real-world working experience. The company has also partnered with Liguori Academy, also in Philadelphia, supporting the students with fundraising, mentoring, and with an advisory board made up of CMI/Compas staff volunteering their skills to help the school, including a social media campaign that aided in fundraising.
A positive employee experience is a priority for employees, so CMI/Compas regularly surveys staff on their top desires. CMI/Compas’ HR team uses data and insights to evaluate the current needs and desires of employees and reviews policies and practices to optimize the employee experience; this is bolstered many data points including focus groups and stay interviews. In addition, the company regularly evaluates the work expectations of their talent pools well as those of competitors and the overall industry to create a positive work/life fit. CMI/Compas has been continually recognized for its positive corporate culture. In 2018, more than 25 percent of staff earned promotions, and 116 people hit their 5th or above anniversary.
A highlight for many employees was the annual Year-End Party, held in 2018 at Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles. Eagles star Jason Kelce was brought in to give employees a special speech (and pose for photos.) At the event, executive leadership surprised staff with a bonus week off for everyone, as well as kicking off a month of benefits and surprises for the agency. “This included adding new staff holidays, enhanced salary continuation benefits, additional flexible working arrangements, and technology to better serve the needs of our employees today – and yes, even chair massages – all to show how much the employees are appreciated,” management says.
