Pharma Marketers: A Few Takeaways From The PharmaMed Conference
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Fri, Sep 25, 2009 @ 10:54 AM
Here a few of the nuggets that I took away from this week's MedAdNews PharmaMed conference in Princeton, NJ. (Twitter stream available at #pharmamed hashtag or via coveritlive). The promise for this year's conference -Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.-With a focus behind gaining insight into patient-centered communications, social networking and new technologies, and ROI optimization. (Can't resist linking back to my 6 C's for Better Consumer Engagement: Consumer-first Content, Conversation, Customization, Community, Confidence, and Consistent Commitment.)
Social Media Planning and Optimization
Two key presentations from fellow bloggers:
Jonathan Richman (Dose of Digital)--Just How Digitally Savvy Are Your Patients?
Steve Woodruff (Impactiviti)-Social Media: Where's the Low Hanging Fruit?
Digital Savviness? 
A new marketing term to consider? Jonathan's new tool (which will be ready in January) will help characterize and rate consumers and their social media habits by four areas: productivity (e.g., shopping, paying bills), entertainment (e.g., watching videos, itunes), navigation (e.g., preferred browser, search engine) and social (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, IM). This will provide a mechanism to help Marketers insure- that once objectives are set- that social media tactics match the person and their behavior-not their demographics. It will also encourage Marketers to think 'forward' to get ahead of competition: "What new social media tactics might appeal to this patient with their current social media characterization and use? What else might they be willing to try?"
Where's The Low Hanging Fruit?
Steve has a great way of talking about social media- or "social networking" as he prefers to call it- that makes it easy to understand and think about. His presentation went through some of the do's and don'ts for Marketers, and ended with this slide to capture the questions Marketers can ask to determine what activities and tactics might make the most sense from a community building, business upside and risk profile. He also referenced a great interview with Marc Monseau who leads Johnson & Johnson's blog and twitter efforts that's worth the read.
Other interesting speakers and their thoughts?
Monique Levy, Senior Director of Research, Manhattan Research spoke about Innovative and Effective Patient Adherence Programs. While she provided some good examples of Pharma adherence programs, her main point-which I whole heartedly agree with- is the need to recognize the complexity of adherence, and how much work it requires to really understand what's limiting a particular set of patients from being adherent...
Kip Creel of StandPoint Market Research presented findings from a unique study they designed to better understand what content physicians prefer to improve patient education, how much branding is permissible etc.
Getting the Most Out Of Your Agency was a lively discussion moderated by Chris Truelove, Editor of Med Ad News, with Joe Shields from Enbrel/Wyeth and Dave Paragamian from Euro. Lot's of good dialog on how to keep agency-client teams productive and fresh...
Sander Flaum moderated a lively panel speaking to the Future for Pharmaceutical Promotions.
IMSHealth's John Moran gave an insightful presentation on Achieving Sales, Brand and Managed Markets Alignment. John stressed the increasing opportunities to use patient level data (APLD) to better understand and match new patients using a new drug and the types of physicians with these patient populations. He also urged marketers to focus on the scripts that are up for play-the dynamic scripts- as opposed to those scripts being written for treatment maintenance...
Raj Amin of HealthiNation closed the conference with thoughts on how to best use video in Pharma 2010 marketing plans. He suggests that Marketers not just re-purpose other TV and creative elements, but to think about how to use the video medium to best engage the particular patient target. Also he believes that video creative and distribution go hand and hand, and videos should be no longer than 2-3 minutes, including fair balance.
While this doesn't capture every presentation, hopefully it gives you a flavor for the general learnings and discussions...