May21

Don’t Be Fooled: The Core Tenets of Relationship Marketing Are Timeless

Posted by Peter von Bartheld from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America

By Peter von Bartheld from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America | Published: May 21, 2013

DartGoing back to basics on effective communication can lead to a big impact on your audience.

Pharmaceutical marketing at a glance seems unrecognizable compared to a few short years ago: technological advancements, big data, changing sales models, channel fragmentation, mobile marketing, social media…the list goes on. This constant sea of change is enough to overwhelm even the smartest marketers and strategists. Some marketers have followed the whims of change, prioritizing the latest marketing fads over a sound strategy. However, this reprioritization of communication efforts can lead to risky results. Pharmaceutical marketers will be best served by keeping their focus on the following fundamental marketing objective: getting the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Without a doubt, incorporating modern tactics and media channels can strengthen a campaign’s effectiveness, but the core communication objective should be tied to strategic objectives. In other words, the tail should not wag the proverbial dog. These core objectives should drive the decisions behind the channels, the content, the cadence, and the outcomes toward which a campaign is optimized.

The focus on fundamentals is essential across both patient and healthcare professional marketing campaigns. For example, with traditional patient support programs—which educate patients on their disease state, provide them with lifestyle tips, and empower them with condition management tools—the ultimate objective is to increase persistency and adherence. Rather than haphazardly building a program that randomly combines the latest marketing “it” channels, it is imperative to strategically consider the combination of tactics, channels, and content, at the right cadence to achieve the campaign’s goal: increasing adherence and persistency. While a campaign can and should incorporate channels both old and new, it should be the strategy that drives these decisions.

How to Focus on Fundamentals When Determining a Marketing Strategy

So, how can marketers effectively deliver communications in the ever-changing marketing reality? In the era of data integration and two-way marketing, we recommend using these three best practices to guide the process:

1)      Don’t be afraid to ask—so you can know what they are thinking: A behavioral survey can identify how targets would prefer to receive communications, such as by telephone, email or direct mail. Using this information, design a communication strategy that provides relevant information in the way(s) they want to receive it. By simply asking how an individual wants to be communicated with and by fulfilling that basic need, marketers can more successfully deliver the brand’s message and increase conversion.

2)      Observe, adjust, and make them feel special: With the phenomenal growth and availability of campaign response data, marketers have the opportunity to design and cater communications at the individual level. Creating customized communications and educational tools based on a target’s experience can ultimately lead to greater engagement and positive, impactful outcomes.

3)      Think like them—to understand what they need: As marketers, we measure success by driving impact and ultimately changing behavior. With the data at hand, we can now design and adjust strategies, all the while focusing on the brand’s fundamental goals. These metrics and objectives allow us, as marketers, to start thinking like our targets and asking questions that drive stronger campaigns:

A) What do our targets want and need?

B) How can we strategically design a program to meet these wants and needs?

C) How will we know if we met our targets’ wants and needs?

By remembering to follow these three steps when developing a CRM strategy, we can impact behavior by creating custom relationships based on trust, respect, and value…all by delivering the right message in the right way to the right person.

So while the marketing context, customers and channels have changed and will continue to change rapidly for the foreseeable future, we as marketers must keep our focus on our core, timeless tenets of good marketing: sending the right message at the right time and the right place. By applying some of these best practices, you should be well on your way to maintaining a sound strategy amongst the ever-changing marketing landscape.
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May14

Is There Good Karma in Advertising?

Posted by Gabriel Fernandez-Obregon from Ogilvy CommonHealth - Parsippany, North America

By Gabriel Fernandez-Obregon from Ogilvy CommonHealth - Parsippany, North America | Published: May 14, 2013

buddhaSo much of what we do throughout our careers is interesting…but is it inspiring? Well, we found out recently when the knowledge and information we’ve been exposed to through client work helped me and my wife conceive of and create something entirely new and unexpected. Using the skills we’ve honed while working at ad agencies, my wife and I recently came up with the idea for an iPhone app that aims to improve the world by promoting small changes in daily actions. Basically, we asked the question: what can we do using our advertising knowledge to help make the world a better place? That was the question. “Karmasation” was the answer.

Karmasation, the app we’ve created, is what we somewhat jokingly call an anti-social network. People can post their actions, thoughts, and experiences anonymously and get feedback about whether they deserve good or bad karma. Because users maintain anonymity within Karmasation, they can post honestly. They aren’t speaking to people who know them through various social interactions (as they would on Facebook and Twitter), they’re just speaking to a community of people. Human to human.

The tie-in to social networks, though, comes into play with the idea of gamification, a subject about which we’ve frequently engaged our respective clients. As users participate in Karmasation, they accrue a Karma Profile. Users can simply compete against themselves, or they can share their profiles, posts, and results with Facebook and Twitter to create somewhat of a competition to see who can earn the best karma.

So what type of advertising knowledge were we able to apply while creating the app? And how did that learning continue with Karmasation?
1) The Devil is in the Digital Design. As we’ve worked on different digital platforms for our clients, we’ve learned a bit about clean design and user interaction. Combining that knowledge with being iPhone users ourselves, we had an idea of what would work within the iPhone platform. Are we still learning? Of course! But through our work on our app, we’ve gained a broader understanding of user interaction. We now have a better handle on how users might prefer digital platforms to react and function—not just from an art or copy perspective—but from an overall experience.

2) Bravo for Beta Testing. Again, with the digital platforms we’ve worked on comes testing. The first time my wife worked on a digital presentation, her project manager told her to try and “break it.” And “break it” we did, because before putting an app out there you want to make sure you’ve covered every scenario—not just how you’d use it but also how anyone else might. Because our app has more possible combinations of actions than other projects we’ve worked on, we’ve learned the importance of testing in a systematic way with a greater attention to detail. We also found that as we progressed through the rounds of beta testing, we learned ways to better communicate issues we were finding with our developers. Clear communication between team members who understand different aspects of a project is crucial to getting any problems fixed.

3) The Process of Promotion. The obvious one since we’re in advertising. But this time, we are both the agency and the client. Deciding on your own strategy can sometimes be difficult, and as a result, we now have an added sense of respect for our clients. We continue to work daily to find ways to better promote our app so that more people can know, use and enjoy it.

As we continue with Karmasation and our jobs in advertising, we’ve learned from each experience and have already seen how we can apply our learnings from one circumstance to the other. Like karma, what comes around goes around. And in this case, we’d call it good karma!

 

 

Also posted in advertising, Apps, behavior change, Creativity, Design, Great Ideas, Healthcare Communications, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
May10

When Marketing is a Higher Calling

Posted by Amy Graham from Ogilvy CommonHealth Specialty Marketing - Parsippany, NJ

By Amy Graham from Ogilvy CommonHealth Specialty Marketing - Parsippany, NJ | Published: May 10, 2013

careI am not involved in marketing religious products, and trust me when I say that there is no divine intervention lending a hand as I write this. Instead, my higher calling is to market therapies and diagnostics in cancer, HIV and other difficult-to-treat disease states.

What drives a desire to market drugs in these disease states?

Let’s look at the oncology space in the US. Today, there are nearly 12 million living Americans who have received a diagnosis of cancer. They’ve heard those terrifying words, “You have cancer.” Or, “It’s back.” For a small few, cancer has become a chronic disease. But for the majority of patients, the struggle continues on. It’s that struggle that’s driven a unique partnership and bond between patients, caregivers and industry that allows us to dream of how we might impact the course of these diseases.

The hepatitis category is a fast-changing landscape, and is starting to follow many of the practices of both oncology and HIV marketing. As new and more tolerable treatment options become available, so too will the need for better and more comprehensive HCP and patient interaction. Therefore, how we work with all of these audiences is critical.

Why we do what we do

We’re marketers. As such, we still look to position our brand for success, striving to outperform our competitive set. We build a compelling plan and programs for our clients and brands that showcase the data, but also start to touch on the very human element of these diseases.

As a young girl I fondly remember 3 of my mother’s friends—all diagnosed with breast cancer. We lost each of them far too early in their lives. My memories are strong. I remember each of them losing their hair, the swelling of arms and fluid retention with removal of lymph nodes, and dealing with the loss of their breast(s)—both emotionally and physically. What I also remember is the rallying cry that went out from my mom and her friends. Together, they would do whatever was needed, divvying up chores for these women—helping to cook meals, do laundry, carpool kids and service basic human needs. For each of us who end up and stay in this space, there is a human element that is personal and has touched our own lives, so we feel the need to give back.

Giving back

Pharma/biotech companies and agencies alike get the occasional black eye for our deeds and misdeeds.  However in the cancer space I applaud my colleagues—we give back. In cancer care we see compassion and dedication that transcends brand, product and company. We walk to raise both money and awareness, we deliver hot meals, we paint and decorate infusion suites, we support various campaigns that allow patients to express themselves (art, writing, music, etc) and we provide tools and materials that hopefully make life a little bit easier for patient and caregiver. We give back and try to respond to that higher calling we’ve been charged with. With these small gestures we try to touch a life, we hope to impact a life. But in the end, it’s our own lives that are forever changed, forever impacted.

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Apr30

Video Is the New Reality

Posted by Patrick Suler from Ogilvy CommonHealth RedWorks - Parsippany, NJ

By Patrick Suler from Ogilvy CommonHealth RedWorks - Parsippany, NJ | Published: April 30, 2013

Phone Video_ThumbnailWhen I was in college, I studied both film and philosophy. Regarding philosophy, to paraphrase Steve Martin, I remember just enough to screw me up for the rest of my life.

One of the reasons I love video is that it is a simulated reality. Although print, radio, and poetry all evoke different wonderful experiences, video feels the most like real life.

Simulated reality, though, is not reality, and that’s great! It’s better than reality. Because we can construct the world as we think it is…as we feel it is…as we wish it to be.

And as grandiose and highfalutin as that sounds, it actually applies to us quite specifically in pharma advertising. With video, we can truly bring a brand to life. That’s important. So important, I’ll say it again, this time boldfaced, and in italics:

With video, we can truly bring a brand to life.

Think about it. You can see a product in three dimensions, hear patients or doctors or scientists talk about it, portraying either personal experience, or research, or clinical trials; contemporary 3D animation is so good now, you can see on a molecular level how a compound works exactly. Video is creatively exhilarating.

Audiences these days also crave and utilize video more than ever. What’s the first thing most people do when they want to learn about anything? They look it up on YouTube. Well, they actually Google it first, but YouTube results show up at the top.

Personally, I go to YouTube for nearly everything: to check out music, to learn how to tile a floor, to watch cat videos, or to find out about particle physics. And of course I’m not the only one.

You can count on the fact that any patient or HCP will be inclined to do a search for a product. If there’s a legit-looking video there to greet them, you can count on them watching it.

What do you want to show the world about your brand?

There may be plenty of not-legit-looking videos about your product. Viewers, though, have developed a sense that crappy videos on YouTube are not very credible, and click away quickly.

High production values can deliver a huge amount of credibility to your brand. Not just a well-designed logo, but excellent lighting, good audio where you can clearly hear the voice, beautiful cinematography, innovative motion graphics, sound design…all these things bring a viewer into a world, a simulated reality, that shows experientially what a brand is like.

OK, OK, I know what you’re thinking…you’ve got a little Muse on one shoulder whispering all the cool things you could do in video, and a little Regulator on the other shoulder with a pile of ISI that will have to be attached.

Well, I say don’t worry about it!

Firstly, video producers in healthcare are quite skilled at dealing with fair balance and ISI. We know how to make it quite palatable! Secondly, consumers and HCPs have integrated safety information into their viewing experience. Pharma TV commercials are now nearing 20 years old, so some younger viewers have heard ISI their whole lives and think nothing of it.

Honestly, I’m shocked that more brands in pharma aren’t using video. The other day I went to the website for Moleskine, which makes notebooks. They’re basically a glorified stationary brand. And they have a YouTube channel. With hundreds of videos. Hundreds. About a NOTEBOOK.

Seriously, it’s a digital, digital, digital, digital, digital, digital world. There are videos all over the place. Every new business budget should have a brand video built right in. Not having a video is like not having a logo. But more importantly…

A video represents the best of what your brand can be; a video represents what your brand is, and a video places your brand firmly in the senses of the viewer, creating a powerful and lasting experience.

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Apr16

Introducing Once-Monthly Tournamax?

Posted by David Leonardi from Ogilvy Healthworld-NY, North America

By David Leonardi from Ogilvy Healthworld-NY, North America | Published: April 16, 2013

Basketball PersonSo, like most of us, my experience spans multiple therapeutic areas. I’ve worked in the field of Rheumatology. Created campaigns in Oncology. Produced TV spots, print ads and RM programs in Pulmonology, Gastroenterology and Dermatology.

But I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks, what if our industry expanded to yet another fast-growing scientific field that sweeps the nation every year: Bracketology.

I’m sure someone, somewhere, is working on the drug to help. Therefore, I’ve taken the liberty of preparing the TV script so we’re locked and loaded for the DTC launch.

Open on the appropriate and ubiquitously RC-friendly activity of a Big Dance. An announcer would say…

Announcer: If you’re a college basketball fan and suffer from sleepless nights, indecision making your picks and general anxiety at the start of spring, you could be suffering from March Madness.

Once-monthly Tournamax can help. Only Tournamax provides clarity and faith to help you identify potential upsets, make sense of any Missouri Valley Conference entries and avoid a complete bracket implosion. And it’s not a steroid.

Tournamax is not for golf aficionados. Side effects may include sweaty palms during the Final Four, nausea if your alma mater loses early, and swollen egos. Tournamax can lead to random screams of “go” followed by a color, most commonly blue and orange. If a 16-seed beats a 1-seed, stop taking Tournamax immediately and contact your doctor.

It’s your bracket. It’s your office pool. It’s your Tournamax.

I’m telling you, if we can launch brands for Thrombocytopenia Purpura in Hematology, we got this.

 

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Apr4

Positioning: Impossible!

Posted by Terrence Rouse from Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide - Parsippany, NJ

By Terrence Rouse from Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide - Parsippany, NJ | Published: April 4, 2013

Circle in SquareFor most of us, working in pharmaceutical marketing is a joy. We are challenged to use our brains daily and we find the marriage of science and creativity a fulfilling career path. But there are at least two aspects of mainstream advertising where I become jealous of our consumer packaged goods brethren: 1) when they get to make beer commercials, and 2) when they are developing new positioning concepts.

I’m quite sure I would struggle writing a creative brief targeted at 24-year-old men who drink beer, and I probably would find trying to differentiate soap or toilet paper equally frustrating. But it has to be easier than positioning new pharmaceutical brands, doesn’t it? So I ask, “What makes positioning pharmaceutical brands now so especially difficult?”

There are at least two major challenges to landing on a strong positioning statement for many of our clients.

1)      Few chronic and serious diseases can be radically altered by the introduction of a new drug.  Instead, there tends to be a first-in-class innovator followed by a series of subsequent launches that offer incremental improvements. Being a little bit more efficacious, being a little bit safer, or hitting a new endpoint in a clinical trial are highly valuable improvements, but are not always linchpins for dynamic positioning.

2)      The ubiquitous positioning template that most pharma clients use can make it hard to focus.  Even when a brand team is committed to focusing on a single core differentiated benefit (CDB), we are too often caught loading the reason-to-believe (RTB) section with handfuls of secondary product  features and scores of emotional benefits.

Remember your first positioning workstream when you came up with empowerment, confidence, and liberation? They are great words, but they have been considered by every product launched in recent memory.

Can’t decide between efficacy and tolerability—why not check the thesaurus to see if there is a synonym for quality of life? (Hint: one doesn’t exist.)

But picking on the process is the easy part; coming up with dynamic positioning is more difficult. The good positioning checklist often wants to know if we are credible, sustainable, compelling, differentiating, etc. But we need more than that. For many of our oncology and specialty products, where differentiation has to be more than just your Kaplan-Meier curve, we are starting to challenge our clients to ask the following questions:

  • Is there a space “above the brand” where we can take a position? Instead of trying to meet an unmet need, is there a cultural trend that can be addressed by our brand’s best self?
    • We often look to our Ogilvy & Mather consumer clients for inspiration. How did IBM convert information overload into a smarter planet campaign? How did Dove transcend a cultural obsession with perfection into the campaign for real beauty? How did environmental awareness and activism change BP into Beyond Petroleum?
  • What can we do to change the rules?
    • Can your product be the advanced practitioner brand, the tele-medicine brand, or the unique offering that can help navigate the evolving environment of the accountable care organization?
    • Can you, gasp, ditch the template? Explore different “concepts” to show your positioning. Maybe prose, maybe some pictures, perhaps a video. If you are committed to testing your positioning concepts (and I say hats off to those who have the conviction NOT to test), give the respondent something interesting to noodle over.
  • Are you aligned?
    • Marketing may want to push clinical data that may or may not be superior to the competition, but are your investigators talking up your safety profile on the podium? If your primary customers balk when your reps present efficacy, are they going to retreat directly to the comfort of your AE profile? The position has to work for everybody.
  • Can you have fun doing it?
    • Take a chance, be crazy, challenge yourselves!

What do you find most nerve-wracking about positioning biopharma brands? I’d love to hear your war stories, and better yet, I would love to hear how you made it work!

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Apr2

The True Life of an Ogilvy Healthworld Fellow

Posted by Claire Lormor from Ogilvy HealthPR - London, UK

By Claire Lormor from Ogilvy HealthPR - London, UK | Published: April 2, 2013

beautiful view of big ben, london

The Fellowship Scheme at Ogilvy Healthworld in London is one of the most comprehensive in the field. Fellows spend two years rotating through core disciplines of Advertising, Market Access, Medical Education, PR, Digital and Strategy/Planning. The scheme involves a combination of training, coaching, assignments and project work. Claire Lormor, who started in September 2012, reveals what it is really like. 

 The selection process

Once I had submitted an essay, filled out a comprehensive questionnaire and got through two rounds of agonising interviews, you would have thought I gained myself a nice little place on the sofa of successful Ogilvy Healthworld fellows. No. It wasn’t until I got invited to an “assessment day” that I realised the real selection process had only just begun.

I arrived early on the assessment day, but I was still one of the last to arrive due to the number of keen beans who believe that you will automatically get a job if you arrive to an interview three hours early. After talking to the other potential fellows for about a minute, I realised that they all seemed to have spent the last two years in the industry or getting to know everything about the industry, whereas I had shamelessly spent the last two years travelling the world and doing ski seasons. My nerves were definitely getting the better of me. Luckily the pain au chocolat, Ogilvy branded M&Ms and the concept of a Friday drinks trolley were enough for me to calm down and remember why I really wanted this job.

The main focus of the day was our individual two-minute presentations, where we had to explain to the jury (board of directors) and the other fellows why an object of choice best described ourselves. Some were weird and some were wonderful. People described objects such as water bottles, eggs, books, spectacles and sailing masts. I still don’t know how Ogilvy analysed our presentations; maybe it was just for comedy value!

When the presentations, interviews, brainstorms and team exercises came to a close, we all went our separate ways and waited for the call. I am sure you are not on the edge of your seat wondering whether I got the job or not, but I would like to confirm that I did, and I am now an Ogilvy Healthworld fellow who thoroughly enjoys being lost in the world of health comms.

Moving to London

A great summer of relaxation before I start my fellowship: tick.

A car full of clothes ready to travel 300 miles to London: tick.

A house in London: oh no.

How can someone who knows London about as well as they know the North Pole decide where they want to live? You can’t just ask your friends or colleagues, because wherever they live is “definitely the best place to live.” You can’t ask your parents because they will say the safest place in London, which is guaranteed to be the dullest. You can’t couch-surf because everyone will judge you for being a 23-year-old young professional living on someone’s couch. And you can’t stay in a hotel because one night would cost a year’s wages (not quite).

After spending weeks wandering the streets of London and going to numerous restaurants and bars (it was awful), I decided on an area which I thought would be the best place for me to eat, drink, shop and sleep. It may sound like your idea of hell, but after a lot of strange phone calls and awkward viewings I am happy to say that I am the proud owner of a room in an eight-bed house in the centre of Clapham Junction with other 20-somethings who enjoy working during the week and partying on the weekend.

The other fellows

They say you can find everything on the Internet, but they also said that the world was going to end…weeks ago.

As soon as I found out I was going to be a fellow, I naturally went straight to Google/Facebook to see if I could identify who the other selected fellows were. Ogilvy managed to keep this information from us until our very first day of the fellowship. It was then that I was introduced to Emma (the spectacles girl), James (the sailing mast boy), Pippa (the hockey top girl), Houda (the framed letter girl), Sophie (the Rolling Stones record girl) and Izzy (the can of Foamburst girl).

Not a bad bunch to spend the next two years with!

My first rotation

The fellowship scheme is for people who know they want to be in health comms but are unsure of what area they want to go into. To cater to our indecisiveness, the fellows and I are placed in three of the five departments over the course of two years in the hope that we find our feet and decide what we want to do with our life along the way.

I was delighted when I was told that my first rotation would be in PR, but at the same time I had no idea what PR was. Five months down the line and to me PR means: general admin, media monitoring, budget tracking, long hours and plenty of meetings. However, it also means: working as a team, keeping up-to-date with the pharmaceutical industry, liaising with clients, organising events, communicating with medics around the world, and assisting in the launch of new healthcare products. It’s a hard knock life in PR, but in the world of healthcare comms hard work never goes unnoticed.

As a whole, my experience in Ogilvy Healthworld has been thoroughly enjoyable. If the interesting world of healthcare, a great group of people, a friendly atmosphere, and a cake for everyone’s  birthday isn’t a reason to get up in the morning, I don’t know what is. I am very much looking forward to my next 18 months as a fellow and I hope to experience more of what Ogilvy Healthworld and London have to offer!

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Mar28

What Health Marketers Need to Know About Google’s Knowledge Graph

Posted by Anthony Danzi from Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide - Parsippany, North America

By Anthony Danzi from Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide - Parsippany, North America | Published: March 28, 2013

Tiger_ADDo you know Tiger Woods’ real first name? It’s Eldrick. How about his middle name? No, it’s not Serial Philanderer, it’s Tont. As a weekend hacker and golf enthusiast, I knew about Eldrick, but I had never heard Tont before.

I came across this little nugget when I did a Google search on “Tiger Woods.” In fact, if you do a search on any celebrity, historical figure, artist, movie title, geographic location, etc., the right side of Google’s page will likely display a mini bio of facts, images and links to related information.

Lipiator_AD

Google implemented this feature, which it calls the Knowledge Graph (KG), in May of last year, and it has slowly been evolving to include other verticals. At the end of November, Google got the attention of healthcare marketers when it began including brand and generic drug information into the KG, or what some in the industry have relabeled as the Medication Knowledge Graph (MKG).

MKG results are populated from three primary sources—the FDA, the National Library of Medicine, and the Dept. of Veterans Affairs—and any brand whose drug label information is sent by the manufacturer to the FDA is eligible for inclusion.

The info you’re likely to find will be:

  • Indication
  • Side Effects
  • Warnings
  • Drug Class
  • Related Medications or Related User Searches

Interestingly, there is currently no option for removal or exclusion from the MKG. And while the implications to marketers may at first seem negative—having side effects, warnings and competitor information positioned prominently against your brand—there may be positives as well. For example: the indication, which is always a challenge to present against a brand name because of fair balance requirements, is now being displayed for you. Your brand may show in the MKG of a competitive brand. Some MKG listings have a “May Treat” result, containing potential off-label uses for that drug.

As I mentioned, the format is evolving.  As users become more familiar with the MKG format, and more trusting of the info being provided, the greater the SEM/SEO challenge becomes to gain visibility in the all-important search space. Creative pharma marketers will find ways to complement or feed off of the MKG results. Those who ignore this new format will likely miss out on qualified website traffic.

And no, while we don’t yet know all there is to know about the impact of the Knowledge Graph, we do know that we need to stay in the know—know what I mean? So keep on it, I gotta run—my wife just called and said she got a provocative text message from some guy named Eldrick. Yikes!

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Feb20

Jump Into the Petri Dish

Posted by Dan Chichester from Ogilvy Healthworld-NY, North America

By Dan Chichester from Ogilvy Healthworld-NY, North America | Published: February 20, 2013

sxsw logo

What’s the proper armamentarium when it comes to healthcare marketing and digital?

Innovation reports? Transmedia projections? Paradigm framework event horizons? Phased plasma rifles in the 40-watt range?

All may play a role. But I put forward that the most important tool is a firm belief in a simple axiom:

“You don’t know what you don’t know.”

That’ll keep you humble. That’ll keep you honest. Most keen, that’ll keep you hungry. And there’s no better place to find out what you don’t know in digital—and be inspired by the new knowledge that comes with those revelations—than SXSW Interactive.

“SXSW”—South by Southwest, or simply “South by” to vets—is the biggest conference of its kind in the world. Held every March in Austin, Texas, this “geek spring break” is an active incubator for leading-edge concepts and emerging tech. Last year, 25,000+ programmers, educators, designers, bloggers, and influencers took part in 1,000+ presentations, meetups and workshops.

With a crazy variety of programming, SXSW has been called a “big picture analysis of the future.” And as tech entrepreneur Geoffrey Clapp notes, SXSW refreshingly provides a “healthy dose of technologists, futurists, and thinkers who don’t start the conversation with: ‘But the FDA will never let us do that!’”

That doesn’t mean pursuing a compelling trend in spite of regulatory concerns. Experience provides the proper filters and balance. But achieving the potential of our clients’ brands means being energized and active in this critical area.

How does this compare to your typical healthcare web conferences? Web consultant Ed Bennett calls out most of those events as “3 to 5 years behind the curve. At SXSW, I’m seeing 3 to 5 years out.” Me, I’ve always liked the angle of living in the future, challenged and exposed to new ways of keeping the neurons firing. Plus I dig the idea of owning a personal jetpack.

At Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide, digital—laptops, tablets, smartphones, websites, apps or whatzits yet to be conjured — is the critical cornerstone for our next-gen biz. That’s sympatico with the words of web strategist Jeremiah Owyang: “With engagement experiments everywhere you look, SXSW is a petri dish of social and interactive behaviors, a bellwether of what could be…” I was never much good at math—but even I can multiply those two thoughts to see there’s enormous potential in being in Austin in March.

That’s why we’ve committed to participating in this “serendipitous living lab.” There’s a deliberate chaos at work that fosters connections that weren’t expected. Our troops on the ground are there to forge new relationships with digital stakeholders, garnering dynamic insights into what’s next—and exploring ways that our pharma and healthcare partners can take advantage. This is where we can hammer and hone our expertise, test bold ideas, and share thought leadership to the health and wellness discussions rising up at South by.

As evidence of that: SXSW’s highly competitive panel selection process picked not just one, but two of our presentations to be featured sessions at the 2013 show: Digital Primitives—The Anthropology of Social, by Brad Davidson and Rob Malouf; and Information Overload & Health Decisions, hosted by Joe Gattuso and John Nosta. Watch this space: they will be sharing details on these very interesting conversations in the weeks leading up to SXSW.

This isn’t an event for every agency. The buzz isn’t always accurate. The noise level can be overwhelming. Up against that, some marketers may conclude that the comfort zone of business-as-usual has an easy, “We’ve got this!” appeal. Until that buffer erodes—quickly—and hanging back becomes left behind.

That’s not a position we’ve ever been willing to take. That’s what makes our investment in SXSW so worth it. To learn what we don’t know. To debate possibilities. To level up. To make certain our contribution to each client’s business features the right piece of the future.

If your calendar doesn’t feature SXSW Interactive this year, don’t feel left out. We will be glad to catch you up—in person, or via WebEx. More than a recap, we can also make this about identifying opportunities for your company and brand at the 2014 show. Let me know and we’ll set it up.

And if you do find yourself in Austin between March 8th and 12th, shoot me a note, text or tweet. I can always use a good collaborator on getting that jetpack fired up.

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Questions? Comments? You can contact the author directly at blog@ochww.com.
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Also posted in advertising, Digital, Healthcare Communications, Social Media, SXSW Interactive, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
Feb5

Analytics Drives the Contact Center

Posted by Angelo Campano from Ogilvy Healthworld - NY, North America

By Angelo Campano from Ogilvy Healthworld - NY, North America | Published: February 5, 2013

Call-Centers

“This call may be monitored and recorded for training purposes.”That’s a familiar refrain to all of us who’ve called into a call center in the last 15 years or so. In the past, these recordings were used for exactly what the recordings stated—company supervisors would listen to them to perform employee evaluations. Recently, however, companies are driving a change from this traditional tactical approach, moving toward a more strategic focus by mining this mostly untapped goldmine of data coming from the voices of their customers.

Most companies are now changing their focus and targeting the untapped opportunity in the recordings of their customer interactions. We need to do the same, and as we do, we are learning more and more.

Identifying opportunity in contact center communications with analytics

The call center (which should be referred to as a “contact center” because it does a lot more than just handle phone calls) is a place that more people interact with on a daily basis than see the average advertisement. It is also where customers and prospects provide priceless feedback on the products and services (including customer service) that our clients offer. The continued reduction in the cost of data, salesforce.com products, and voice-identification cloud-based software now allows us to identify important trends, opportunities and risks in the conversations our clients have with their most important constituents.

Companies should record 100% of their calls. If they do, by using call analytics, we can identify potential issues before they negatively impact the company. For example, not long ago we were able to identify a trending problem and take steps to address it before it resulted in a huge issue. The issue was with direct mail, but it was found at the contact center level with the advanced methodologies we used in our contact center analytics. Our client believed (and we validated and proved) that call analytics helped proactively save them thousands of dollars while gaining thousands of incremental Rx’s (think Rx lift).

Get rid of the contact center silo

As the new insights from customer interactions become available, the traditional silos between the contact center and other marketing areas are coming down. The untouched data mined from contact centers can be used as essential building blocks to inform multiple aspect of the business. We need to push our clients to eliminate the informational silos and share data, especially within the contact center. It can, has, and will result in tremendous new opportunities.

More than anything, gaining real-world customer feedback can help us fine-tune what and whom to target, understand how targets respond to information, and determine how they should receive information. Using the insights of this “big data,” we can transform how our customers think. Using the contact center to find and deliver what we all already know we must deliver—the right message to the right person in the right way at the right time—can help produce a guaranteed ROI.

Optimizing ROI with contact center analytics

The No. 1 thing teams, clients, us, the President, and probably God want to see from any new campaign or program is a positive return on investment (ROI). Contact center recordings and analytics will provide a measurable ROI to our clients and customers—all by using the voice of the contact center to find gaps and make needed changes as they are found.

And given the cost savings, improved efficiency, customer retention and new opportunities identified by the campaign, companies are able to see ROI timelines that are measured in weeks, not months or years.

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Questions? Comments? You can contact the author directly at blog@ochww.com.
Please allow 24 hours for response.

Also posted in Analytics, Clients, Customer Relationship Marketing, Data, Healthcare Communications, Research | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment