A Hammer for Every Nail: Exploration of AI at Cannes
This IQVIA-sponsored podcast drills deep to highlight very specific ways AI can supercharge healthcare marketing efforts.
Oleg Korenfeld, chief technology officer for the CMI Media Group and Compas, set the stage for this conversation by describing the three applications of AI used in healthcare marketing today.
“One has to do with task automation,” he explained. “Training bots to perform tasks that humans used to do manually.” That increases both speed of execution and accuracy of the work.
“The second is predictive AI, where you take large amounts of data and do forecasting,” continued Korenfeld. “And then there’s generative AI, which is what people know best because of [entities] such as Chat GPT and OpenAI.”
Edith Hodkinson, head of digital strategy for IQVIA, pointed out that AI has been around for more than 20 years in, whereas generative AI just started 18 months ago.
“What makes GenAI different,” she noted, “is that you can use it to generate new content.”
Putting AI to work
Podcast moderator Steve Madden, editor-in-chief of MM+M, asked his two podcast guests how they put these AI products to work.
“You start by making sure the data you’re feeding the algorithms is as validated as possible,” answered Korenfeld. “These tools don’t think. They’re only as good as the data you feed into them.”
Hodkinson added that any large-language models you use must be specifically developed for healthcare.
Of course, privacy concerns must always be top of mind.
“The datasets you insert have to be protected,” advised Korenfeld. “You don’t want to dump your client’s information into an OpenAI bot because you don’t know where they’ll store it or how they’ll use it. And the platform you use has to let you store your data in your own cloud, where it’s not allowed to leave your walls.”
Companies wanting to adopt AI must also make space for innovation and invent new positions, continued Hodkinson. “The new prompt engineers we recruit have only 18 months of experience because that’s how long this position has been around.”
The marketing impact
When asked for examples of using AI to implement a marketing strategy, Korenfeld described automating the process for trafficking campaigns into ad servers, which was once a time-consuming manual task.
“You still need human intelligence to oversee it,” he said, “but now we can automate 70% to 80% of it. That’s sped up our time to market by half — with zero errors.”
Hodkinson’s example involved predictive AI.
“After a specific programmatic campaign went live,” she recalled, “we developed 80 different versions of a specific ad, then used predictive AI to understand an individual HCP’s preferences based on, say, the ad’s color and imagery.”
It used to be a guessing game, Korenfeld suggested, “but now the algorithm understands very quickly which variation of these messages works best for different types of HCPs in market by channel. This is as omnichannel as it gets.”
Generating excitement
To illustrate the impact of generative AI, Korenfeld brought up media planning.
“Predictive AI can process the datasets you have and recommend how much money to spend across any channel,” he noted. “Then a planner can use GenAI to ask very specific questions, such as ‘Which suppliers worked best for this campaign?’”
Hodkinson shared that IQVIA is using GenAI to understand HCPs’ research behavior across 5,600 medical websites.
“GenAI gives us summaries of their needs, so we can create media plans personalized to individual HCPs,” she said. “We feed these insights to digital media and to the sales reps — and we’re seeing great results.”
In looking toward the future, Korenfeld concluded, “The more confident we get with these tools, the better we’ll know where the long-term opportunities lie. For now, we’re just scratching the surface.”
*Source: https://www.mmm-online.com/home/channel/sponsored/a-hammer-for-every-nail-exploration-of-ai-at-cannes/*
