Cannes 2024: Shaping the Future of Healthcare Marketing
Personalization. A ”cookieless future.” Just two of the myriad themes discussed at Cannes last week — and highlighted during this IQVIA-sponsored podcast.
“Personalization came up in all the sessions I attended,” reported Edith Hodkinson, head of digital strategy for IQVIA. In that comment, she captured an overarching healthcare-marketing theme from the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity
“When you’re personalizing HCP and DTC experiences,” she added, “you need a deep understanding of your audience, where you’ll reach them, and with what messages.”
Kimberly Jones, president and CEO of Butler/Till, noted that her organization reaches out to HCPs the same way it approaches consumers.
“We talk about finding the ‘blue-jean moment,’” she explained, “when they’re living their day-to-day life outside of their professions. And we want our messaging to be consistent with the DTC messages we’re sending their patients.”
“You don’t want the field force delivering a different message to an HCP than what they’re receiving digitally,” Hodkinson continued. “You want to bring the HCP on a brand journey across multiple channels.”
All that data. What to do?
“When you capture HCPs’ digital behavior, how do you analyze all the data you get?” asked moderator Steve Madden, editor-in-chief of MM+M.
“Having great partners like IQVIA gives us access to that wonderful, rich data that helps us understand HCPs’ writing behavior,” responded Jones. “We use that data to target more effectively. In one study, we learned that we were wasting media dollars by reaching 19% of an audience that wasn’t likely to write a script.”
Hodkinson mentioned that IQVIA found that a sales-rep interaction works better when they digitally “warm up” the HCP beforehand.
“We saw a 20% increase in scripts when we combined digital and sales force interactions,” she noted.
In the end, it’s all about building awareness.
“You reach them with messages that are relevant to them at the right time,” advised Jones. “Then when a sales rep walks in, they’re much more likely to take the call and to consider the product.”
Jones brought up the “cookieless future” (dubbed “the cookiepocalypse” by Madden) and pointed out that first-party data has become really important to healthcare brands.
Hodkinson pointed out that building first-party data is a challenge for pharma brands.
“You must have a value exchange on your website for an HCP or consumer to register and give you consent,” she explained. “What do we do in a cookieless world? Well, you might have a very rich opted-in first-party database — or you might be focusing right now on building that.”
And this allows for more creativity, continued Jones, as you’re forced to think about what your audience finds valuable. Plus, “Data integrity is the first step in harnessing the new AI tools. With IQVIA’s help, we’re faster at getting to measurement so we can optimize a campaign midstream.”
AI enters the conversation
Next topic: Is AI speeding up the MLR process?
“Absolutely,” asserted Hodkinson. “Now that you can train a model to create new content from pre-approved materials, you can use AI to understand what will get through the MLR process.”
Health equity was the next trend discussed. Madden pointed out that while AI holds great promise, it’s predicated on data and muchhealthcare data has built-in bias. So, how can digital marketing avoid that?
Both podcast guests agreed that starting with clean, accurate and comprehensive data is key. Plus, you need to know the source, said Jones: “If the data comes from a clinical trial, for example, was the sample population representative?”
“At Butler/Till we take a very patient-centered approach,” she concluded. “As an industry, if we’re not trying to reach healthcare equity, we’re doing everybody a disservice.”
