Charlene Prou-nis, CEO and
Managing Partner, Flashpoint
Medica:
Pharma’s reputation
has been in a
slide for over a
decade (~ 15 years ago, pharma was
still ranked among the top 10 most
admired industries), largely driven
by the poor perception of pricing
policies/big pro;ts, lack of transparency in corporate activities – how
trials are conducted/data reported
and marketing activities, o;-label
promotion/penalty ;nes and payments physicians. Much has been
done to correct this, some through
regulation, like the Sunshine act
and others through corporate announcements that all trial data will
be published, but generally, the
public is unaware of these actions.
For pharma to right itself and regain the public’s trust, ;rst and foremost, transparency is key – and that
means more communication. Two
areas emerge: education on research and education on the value
of medicines. First, they will need
to educate the public on the good
they do in funding important research, as well as the economic activity they support in communities,
and, second, educate on the value
of new medicines in changing people’s lives.
Regarding the good they do,
type of messaging:
Simply put, people are living lon-
ger and more productive lives, and
that’s what we all want. Five-year
cancer survival rates are up 30 per-
cent across all cancers, with 2 out
of 3 people surviving at least ;ve
years, people with HIV/AIDS now
live with a chronic condition, not a
fatal disease, multiple sclerosis pa-
tients have dramatically improved
outcomes with disability being tre-
mendously slowed and hepatitis C
therapies have cure rates of more
than 90 percent. These are the mir-
acles of medicine that the pharma
companies have to remind the
world about.
The value message needs to be
heard with some of the key points
being:
• Spending on prescriptions
remains the same at 10 percent
from 1960; more has shifted to pa-
tients in terms of co-insurance, high
tier status
• Pharma industry is #1 for R&D
expenditures per employee, above
all other sectors (chemical, semi-
conductor, computer, aerospace
etc), so it is the pharma companies
that are undertaking the responsi-
bility of improving human health.
• Large economic reach sup-
porting jobs – Biopharmaceutical
industry supports 3. 4 million jobs
across the economy
• Industry-sponsored clinical tri-
als contribute to communities ($25
billion in economic activity)
Source ( PhRMA.org)
Regaining trust takes time and
doing the right thing day after day,
and communicating about it, will
help pharma regain its rightful position as one of America’s most admired industries.
Ken Begasse,
Co-Founder and
CEO, Concentric
Health Experience: This has
been coming for
some time. I remember sitting
in a cab on my way to P;zer in 2001
and hearing the ;rst anti-pharma
backlash story on NPR highlighting the role of DTC advertising, physician marketing practices, and the
rising pro;ts of pharma. As a young
executive, I sat listening and silently implored our industry leaders to
stand up, defend us, and help America understand all the good we do.
Unfortunately, I’m still waiting, and
the situation is more dire than ever.
At the turn of the century, 9 in
10 Americans had a positive im-
pression of pharma; today, it’s 1 in
10. We know that history can provide some of the most powerful lessons for the present, and as I examined what was responsible for such
a strong sentiment historically, my
hope was renewed and my conviction galvanized that now is the time
for the industry to regain the public’s trust and admiration.
When W WII ended, it ushered in
the Golden Age of pharma. Novel
drugs were being developed that
changed lives. Vaccines were eradicating devastating diseases like polio. Contraception was introduced
as an important tool in the women’s
rights movement. We were exploring treatments for cardiovascular
diseases and cancer. This was a period of resounding success.
The downside, of which we are
all painfully aware, was brought to
life in that NPR story. Pharma became “big business,” with a focus
on blockbuster drugs and the marketing of disease states. Novel therapies fell away, and the ;ood of“me
too” drugs hit the market. As a result, the public sentiment toward
pharma plummeted.
The exciting news for industry
leaders is that we have the tools at
our disposal to reignite the love affair with pharma. It’s a simple formula, really – human ingenuity
and collaboration, the advancement of science, and improving
quality of life.
When you evaluate pharma
against those criteria, consider the
accomplishments and pending innovations that can drive us into another Golden Age. We have treated
and are close to curing many cancers. A Hep C cure is in our grasp. HIV
has been downgraded to a chronic
disease. Cardiovascular disease and
diabetes are areas where we see
collaboration between diagnostic,
pharmaceutical, and device players to create e;ective treatments.
These will essentially be the rock-
ets we can ride into the future.
Yet that is only part of the equation. More than ever, a company’s
value is determined by customer
sentiment. Turing Pharmaceuticals
showed us that when your principles go awry, the public’s voices can
unite and take you down in a matter
of 24 hours. We have to change the
public conversation away from profits and M&A to how we’re helping
patients. We need to demonstrate
how novel therapies and cutting-edge scienti;c advancements are
improving quality of life and eradicating disease.
If we as an industry act on these
principles – and act quickly – aligning with what people need and
showing the world who we really are, I have no doubt that Americans will fall in love with pharma all
over again.
Stefan
Armstrong,
Partner and Director of Analytics, Greater Than
One:
Many of the problems with perception of the pharma industry are
related to the fact that the pharma
industry has let itself be promoted
by advertising agencies that do not
understand medicine, and confuse
consumeristic value propositions
with the values and ethics of illness
and recovery, death and struggle.
Consumer advertising is based on
the pleasure principle, eros, a funda-
mental drive of human experience.
Pharma is based mostly on the corre-
sponding principle of thanatos, what
has ungracefully been translated as
The Magazine of Pharmaceutical Business and Marketing • medadnews.com • December 2015 • Volume 34, Number 6 • $25
Inside
PHAR A:
Pharma
perform to
raise mo ’s
Hospita ....... 18
MOBI NG:
Pharma come
much m h
the use ng,
but with ral
reaching the
industry hing
past the nd
provide ........ 20
NEW
For the e News
has cho utical
Marketin h
that cou
pharmaceutical products are
marketed and sold............................ 22
continued on page 6
Executives from the 2015 and 2014 Manny Award
winners and ;nalists share their views on
a variety of industry-related topics.
18 MEDAD NEWS DECEMBER 2015
lection Day is not the only
big event that occurs dur-
ing every early November.
For the eighth consecu-
tive year, The CDM Group
hosted Pharmapalooza – a battle of the
pharma ad agency bands – at B.B. King
Blues Club & Grill in Midtown Manhattan.
The Nov. 5th, 2015, event raised $97,000
for the Creative Arts Therapy Program at
the Children’s Hospital atMontefiore. The
grand total for all Pharmapalooza events
has now reached nearly $800,000 in donations to CHAM. The funds raised pay
for a full-time art therapist to help children express themselves and experience
some relief from the stresses and difficulties of being hospitalized.
For the firsttime, the true beneficiaries of
this night of music – the kids of CHAM
– were the stars of the event’s campaign.
Thanks to a fun-filled photoshoot at
CHAM with patients and families, this
year’s materials showcased unique photos and artwork for each of the inspiring
CHAM rock stars. As one young patient
explained, “playing guitar helps me forget
about the pain in my body.” This year’s
campaign is a testament to the importance
of art and music to the healing process for
these young patients.
Pharmapalooza is a yearly industry highlight that brings together agencies in a celebration of cooperation, competition, fun,
and charity. It’s a night which the industry
can celebrate the good itdoes in directly
touching the lives of patients in the New
York City community.
To donate to this very
worthwhile cause, please visit:
http://www.montefiore.org/pharmapalooza
Pharma ad agency bands performed in New York City to raise money
for the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM).
Pharmapalooza 8:
A healthy dose of rock
By Andrew Humphreys • andrew.humphreys@medadnews.com
E
SPECIAL FEATURE — PHARMAPALOOZA
• Ultrasound (CDM New York)
• Saatchi & Saatchi Wailers
(Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness)
• The Post-Marketing Adverse
Event (CDMPrinceton)
• County Fair Balance
(CDMiConnect)
• Harrison and Starr
(Harrison and Star)
• Max Dose (Neon)
• Hard to Swallow
(AbelsonTaylor)
• Contraindications (AgencyRx)
The 8 bands of
Pharmapalooza 8:
1st Place: Saatchi & Saatchi Wailers
2nd Place: County Fair Balance
3rd Place: Hard to Swallow
The 2015 Winners:
Saatchi & Saatchi Wailers
County Fair Balance
HardtoSwallow MaxDose
20 MED AD NEWS DECEMBER 2015
f you can’t bear to go half
an hour without your cell
phone, you’re not alone.
As mobile has become
an inextricable part of
our lives, it is rapidly becoming the
preferred window marketers in every
industry will be trying to reach customers through. Even in the conservative
pharma industry, mobile is part of most
campaigns and many brand-supporting
apps are being developed for the sales
force, the physician, and the patient.
But industry experts believe companies can become even more inventive
in their usage of mobile, to thepoint of
apps becoming a valid part of patient
care instead of merely promotional.
According to Graham Johnson, executive VP, product development at FCB
Health, the useof mobile in all industries has reached an inflection point, reminding him of what happened almost
a decadeago when broadbrand Internet
access reached more than 50 percent of
homes.
For Johnson, who was working for
M TV at the time, the blossoming of
broadband created a new opportunity.
“All of a sudden, the idea of delivering
video content to consumers essentially
was possible,” he says. “It really changed
our thinking and our overarching strat-
egy, especially if you’re working at a
company that is sitting on a mountain
of video assets. It’s music to our ears,
that essentially we could put [the con-
tent] out on any online space and see it
get traction.”
For mobile, there are a number of
inflection points, Johnson says. “This
year, 2016 is actually going to be the
first year where there will be a bigger ad
spend in the mobile space than on the
desktop side, which is a huge inflection
point. We’re starting to see, for the ma-
jority of web properties for our clients,
Michael Spitz, VP strategy at Klick
Health, says pharma is getting the mo-
bile message and recognizes the impor-
tance of the medium. “If you look at it
top line, according to eMarketer data, a
quarter of the digital ad revenue spend
in pharmaceuticals is on mobile,” Spitz
says. “And when you take a look at the
differential in terms of growth, year to
year, pharmaceuticals actually top the
list of all industries for growth in terms
of mobilespend.”
According to David Windhausen, ex-
ecutive VP at Intouch Solutions, mobile
gives pharma “an opportunity ... to in-
tersect truly with the triggers that form
our habits.”
“Previously in marketing, and this is
true in pharma marketing as well, it was
really all about the big idea,” Windhau-
sen says. “Everyone would go, “What’s
the next big idea?” And what we have
increasingly seen is that the next big
idea is the sum of many small ideas. The
thing, the coefficient that makes them
work, is how connected they areto the
data of engagement at a personal level
with an individual. And when we think
about the concept of mobile anymore,
we don’t think about it as a single chan-
nel or device, in fact, it almost morphs
into part of a holistic ecosystem that
we’ve created that’s just one small com-
ponent, in and of itself, may not havea
whole lot of meaning. But when you put
it in as onepiece to an entire ecosystem
that you’ve created to wrap that patient,
now you’ve got something that’s truly
amazing.”
Ideally, mobile can provide a way to
connect the patient and physician to the
healthcare system, ideally through the
trajectory of the patient journey, Spitz
says. The trick is being able to do so in a
sustainable way that allows for pharma
interaction.
Away from the desktop
In terms of other messaging that was
typically accessed via desktop computers, mobile has come into its own. According to Johnson, about 65 percent
of thetime consumers are reading their
e-mail on their phones. And for physicians, it’s about 80 percent.
“If you’re continuing to develop for
a desktop experience, but that’s not
where the majority of your consumers are, you’ve really missed the mark,”
Johnson says.
Jacob Lustig, VP media innovation
at Klick Health, agrees that the industry needs to shift its development focus
away from the desktop environment,
and points out recent data from Google
shows mobile search comprises 50 percent or more of search activity. Spitz
says for some of Klick’s clients, traffic
engagement through mobile devices —
smartphones and tablets — can be as
high as 60 percent, and can run even
higher for HCPs who are predominantly
using Apple devices.
Keeping that high mobile usage in
mind, “it behooves us and our clients to
make sure that the backend experience,
the content, really aligns together with
that,” Lustig comments.
When it comes to developing content
and apps for mobile, Lustig says companies need to consider a couple of factors.
“It really comes do wn to a couple
of elements from the media perspec-
tive, does the right inventory exist that
brands want to use, do they have the
right topic of content, is there the right
amount of data that they would use in
desktop,” Lustig remarks. “The second
thing it comes do wn to is the privacy
policy. A lot of pharmaceutical com-
panies have a privacy policy that just
focuses on the cookie ecosystem from
desktop and hasn’t really factored in
elements like location or the resettable
device ID, or any of those factors.”
Lustig says pharma companies need
to take the time to create a content de-
velopment pathway and an infrastruc-
ture that is optimized to deliver the ideal
mobile experience that fits how patients
or HCPs areusing mobile.
According to Spitz, “There is a delta
between the engagement levels and
expectations of the pharma audience,
whether its HCPs, patients, or caregiv-
ers, and the mobile/digital assets we’re
providing and creating, at least in terms
of assets, and especially in digital as-
sets and owned properties.” This delta
includes privacy concerns and require-
ments in fair balance that can over-
whelm the smaller real estate of the
smartphone screen.
When it comes to the tiny mobile
leaderboard ads, just 320x50, Spitz says
Klick Health has been “very strategic”
in terms of using these spaces, primarily for unbranded promotion. “You can’t
put 50 percent fair balance on these tiny
ads, it forces us to be more strategic in
how we invest and make recommendations on opportunities and environments where the larger ad sizes that we
can really deliver the value proposition
and the message alongside all the privacy and FDA fair balance requirements,”
he says.
Johnson points out that while it is
difficult to take a concept that was developed for a desktop environment and
translate it to a mobile one, the reverse
is much easier. “If you start developing
for the mobile space, and then you ex-
Pharma companies have become much
more comfortable with the use of mobile in
marketing, but with mobile use in general
reaching an in;ection point, the industry
needs to keep pushing past the basics for
patients and providers.
Beyond the frontier
By Christiane Truelove •
chris.truelove@medadnews.com
I
SPECIAL FEATURE ; MOBILE MARKETING
22 MED ADNEWS DECEMBER 2015
or the eighth time this past
October, Med Ad News be-
gan once again its search
for the future of pharma-
ceutical marketing. We
sought out young companies, spin-offs,
offerings, and ventures to profile that are
providing the most innovative and inter-
esting products, services, or marketing
opportunities to pharmaceutical compa-
nies and the healthcare community. This
year’s first profilee is also a “first” for this
space, the first pharmaceutical company
– rather than service provider, to be pro-
filed – due to its radically different busi-
ness model. The other two profilees both
deal with what may be the modern phar-
maceutical marketer’s most immediate
challenge – how to distill “big data” into
actionable intelligence. Here are Med Ad
News’ next three Pharmaceutical Market-
ing Ventures to Watch.
Medicines360
Medicines360 is a 501(c)( 3) nonprofit
pharmaceutical company with a mission of expanding access to medicines
for women regardless of socioeconomic
status, insurance status, or geographic
location.Thecompanywasfoundedin
2009 with the help of funding from an
anonymous donor who recognized a sig-nificantdisparity in the number of un-planned pregnancies and access to highly
effective contraception, especially among
women with lower incomes and without
insurance. Partnering with the traditional pharma company Allergan, Medi-
cines360 recently earned FDA approval
for Liletta, an intrauterine device for the
prevention of pregnancy, and is now offering the device to clinics for low-income
and uninsured women at the bargain price
of just $50 – IUDs sold through more traditional commercial channels generally
cost in the range of $800-$1,000.
“We are quite unique,” says Medi-
cines360 CEO Jessica Grossman, M.D.
“We’re a nonprofit pharmaceutical company, which means we are driven by missions instead of profit. Our mission today
is to provide a high quality, low cost, or affordable product to women in need. How
we measure our success is by the impact
that our product has on the lives of the
women who need it.”
According to Dr. Grossman, Medi-
cines360 arose out of a longstanding demand in the reproductive health community for a low-cost, highly effective, and
long-acting form of birth control. Commercially available IUDs fit the last two
of these characteristics – but for that very
reason, since they were so effective for so
long, they were also quite expensive, especially for someone with a low income and
no insurance. Solving this cost problem
was the company’s initial challenge.
“We were founded in 2009 with the
sole purpose of developing this type of
hormonal IUD,” Dr. Grossman says. “We
found a product thatexisted in Europe,
but it was only approved in just a few
small countries in Europe. We licensed
it and then launched a large scale retrial
here in the United States. It was the largest U.S.-based trial ever for an IUD.”
One of the difficulties facing IUD marketers in the United States is the mythology, often negative, that has gro wn up
around them – “Oh, well, you can’t get one
if you’re young, you can’t get one if you’ve
never had children, you have to get a STD
test before you get one, you have to get a
pregnancy test,” Dr. Grossman says. So
Medicines360 added components to the
Liletta trial to address some of the myths,
something that had never been done before.
“We did some sub-studies in a large
number of women where we did what we
called a same-day insertion,” Dr. Gross-mantold MedAdNews. “The woman came
in, we didn’t do the sexually transmitted
infection testing, we didn’t do a pregnancy
test, and as long as the physician felt reasonably sure that the woman didn’t have
an infection or wasn’t pregnant, they just
placed the IUD. Then, we looked at the
characteristics and the complications associated with this and we found that there
weren’t any. That’s a really important part
of our label, and what we’re trying to promote is we’re trying to dispel some of the
conventional myths associated with IUDs
so that women can come in and get their
IUD on the same day. They don’t have to
come back because we have found over
time, if a woman has to come back, she often comes back pregnant and thatdefeats
the whole purpose.”
Once the trial was well along, Medi-
cines360 had to solve the next problem
inherent in its mission – distribution
and sales. In 2013, the company formed
a commercial partnership with what was
at the time called Watson Pharmaceuticals and is now Allergan. Allergan was
licensed the rights to commercialize and
distribute Liletta, but with an important
twist – distribution was to be split into
two pathways, one in the private sector for
a commercial price, and the other to Title
X clinics and others that provide family
planning services to low-income and uninsured women, for $50. Thus the traditional private sector sales could help to
fund the discounted mission-driven sales.
Liletta was approved by FDA this past
February for prevention of pregnancy for
up to three years – the clinical trial is still
ongoing, with the goal of extending the
length of the indication. Since approval
and launch, the leaders of Medicines360
have been focusing their efforts on getting
the word out.
“We’re still in pretty early days, and we
are a small non-profit organization so we
have to raise awareness,” Dr. Grossman
says. “We spent a lot of time and energy
this year exhibiting at public health conferences, talking to the Medicaid director
and a lot of public health clinics, since a
lot of our target patients are in Medicaid.
We’ve been trying to go very grassroots to
get the word out, but we still have a lot of
work to do there.”
One of the unexpected fringe benefits
of Medicines360’s dual-prong commercialization strategy is that buyers on the
private side can be made aware that their
purchase is subsidizing care for the less
fortunate – something that, for the social-ly conscious physician or patient, can be a
key differentiator.
“One of the things that we’re hearing
from physician providers and patients
who are not in this public health space,
who have private insurance and treat patients at specialty clinics, is that when they
hear about our story and what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, they also want
to be involved and provide Liletta to their
private patients at the commercial price
that Allergan is applying because they understand that all proceeds are reinvested
in the mission,” Dr. Grossman says.
Medicines360’s leaders emphasize that
the benefits of their low-cost IUD go well
beyond the obvious fact that women don’t
have to spend as much. Since Title X clinics often do not have the resources to carry
$800-$1,000 IUDs in inventory, their patients frequently have to return later to get
one, even if they can afford it or the clinic
can afford to subsidize it for them. “What
was found by and large is that the woman
wouldn’t come back because we all know
how hard it is to get off work and get into
the clinic, or they would come back pregnant because they weren’t using an effective form of birth control,” Dr. Grossman
says. “So a big driver for us was to be able
to provide this low price so thatclinics can
afford to stock this and have this on their
shelves.”
Canthistypeofnonprofit,dual-path
model work in other pharmaceutical spaces? Dr. Grossman believes so.
“There are always orphan diseases, orphan drugs and orphan diseases,” she
says. “Unfortunately, I think what we’re
seeing today in the pharmaceutical world
is for those rare diseases, the prices are
gettingjacked up and are quite high. You
want to think about public-private partnership in rare diseases, and perhaps for
cancer too. There are many cancer drugs
that are unavailable to people to access
in asafety net clinic, right? So that would
be another area that would be suited for
public-private partnership. There’s going
to be a backlash against the old school
pharmaceutical company who price gouge
where they can because of limited competition – we are going to see new forms of
companies, who are trying to have aprofit
but also contribute to the greater good.”
For Medicines360 itself, the vision goes
well beyond asingle IUD.
“We envision a world where our prod-
ucts will be available globally to women
who need them,” Dr. Grossman told Med
Ad News. “Longer term, we see [Liletta]
as part of a fleet of products. There are
still many other types of contraceptives
that are unaffordable to women, so we are
looking at other contraceptives and other
devices that would meet that need. Where
women in underprivileged communities
don’t have access, that would be a target
for us.”
Reltio
Reltio is a provider of cloud-based data
driven applications, primarily but not exclusively for thelifesciences industry. The
company aims to bring together multiple
data sources to create real and actionable
business intelligence, blending together
master data and big data across all domains and formats from internal, third-party, social media, and other sources.
All this data can be matched, merged,
and shared across multiple applications
and business functions, and the company’s apps offer a spate of visualization
options – storyboards, network graphs,
and recommendation cues, among other
things. Most importantly, though, Reltio
goes beyond mere data collection and
collation by providing built-in machine
learning and analytic capabilities, to offer clients what the company calls “
recommended actions,” steps they can take
based on what all the data is telling them.
“In most marketing apps today, the
onus is really on you as the user to do
all the heavy lifting,” says Ramon Chen,
chief marketing officer of Reltio. “Sure,
the software helps you record the information, so you can record that you visited a physician in a CRM or you, in essence, created a marketing campaign,
but the system doesn’t have any smarts.
It doesn’t really say, ‘Hey, I think you
should go visit this doctor because your
goals for the quarter – I know what your
goals for the quarter are, I know that this
doctor happens to be influential. And by
the way, you don’t know that doctor but
this person that you just e-mailed with is
connected with them and they connect
with them through a particular committee.’ All of this information is usually not
available to you because the data is not
just in CRM, it’s in other systems. But
with Reltio it is not only being brought
together and cleansed and managed and
kept up-to-date, but it’s serving you up
what we call ‘recommended actions,’ essentially guiding you to make the best
possible choices, so really fulfilling the vision of what computers should really be
doing for you versus a CRM system.”
On top of the artificial analytic capabil-
For the eighth year, Med Ad News has chosen three Pharmaceutical
Marketing Ventures to Watch that could change the way
pharmaceutical products are marketed and sold.
Ad-Ventures in Marketing VIII
By Joshua Slatko •
josh.slatko@medadnews.com
F
SPECIAL FEATURE — NEW VENTURES
Medicines360’sfirst product, theIUD
Liletta,is offered through traditional sales
channels for a typical commercial price
but toTitle X family planning clinics for
just $50.
