This is the second year of an ambitious plan to reposition Innovex as the category thought leader. The long-term objective being to equip the brand with sufficient customer permission to launch new sales and marketing services.
We took the radical step of sacrificing all press and outdoor advertising for a digital only strategy, a medium where we could advertise less, debate more and engage our target customers in peer to peer communication.
And its working. Although the website is a totally new resource the industry are visiting, downloading reports, listening to podcasts etc. A full tracking survey is provided.
Background and Scope
The industry is facing massive upheaval as the route to drug discovery changes, is costing more and the resulting drugs not always guaranteed listing even if they are the best treatment (a move known as scrapping the gold standard in favour of health economics) . This places further demands on the marketing of drugs. Consultants and Advisors are telling the pharma and biotech companies to outsource the marketing but they are reluctant because they don’t believe in the capability of CSOs to deliver more complex services.
The campaign is active in the following markets: USA, UK, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Belgium
Strategy
18 months of advertising in 2007/8 began the careful process of repositioning Innovex as the thought leader in the category. But now we had to do more… but there was only so much money.
So we decided to “sacrifice” in one area and “over commit” in another, so we stopped advertising in the traditional sense and create a new website and built our entire campaign around driving traffic to the site. It would contain contentious debate, articles, voting polls, podcasts dedicated to a different hot topic every month:
Research revealed the big issues we needed to debate:
- Can outsourcing marketing work?
- Can outsourcing work across multi-countries
- How can outsourcing help selling direct into hospitals
- How can CSOs help with the new health economics
Dealing with international variation
Culturally these western markets are very similar so all banner advertising/eDMs were merely transcreated in the local market by our partners to ensure meaning and nuance wassuitably recreated.
However, the health industry regulations are very different, market to market. So what the campaign did was take a cross section of issues and solutions from all markets so that clients could take learnings from other markets, or could envision how their market might change based on what has happened elsewhere. This obviously was a key element to being seen as thought leader in that we could show how health economics was developing in Germany and could soon be a practice adopted, say, in the USA, and how those markets might need to prepare.
Solution
Central to our solution was a new website was called The Conversation’ and we started populating it with case studies, white papers, research reports and podcasts.
The site was designed and built by AGA, run off our own servers while our account team worked with the client to write the case studies, edit white papers etc and then devise the podcast debates we wanted to create for our target audience. Interest in the site was generated by eDMs to C-Suite and sales and marketing decision makers of pharmaceutical and biotech companies and by on-line advertising. Although it was hardly advertising in the traditional sense in that it did not talk about Innovex at all, instead it promoted the content of the site with deliberately provocative statements and lines, promising enlightenment for those who visited the site.
Target Audience
C-Suite and sales and marketing decision makers of pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Media
eDMs
On-line advertising via the main industry publication on-line sites
A new independent’ website called The Conversation’.
Timescale
Campaign was created during Jan- March and launched in April 09 and will run for a minimum of one year, dependent on success.
Budget
Spend 6 months to date: approx £250,000
Results
A full web activity report is attached. Needless to say interest in the site is much higher than we had hoped, with thousands of visits and hundreds of resource downloads.
