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W ith the unprecedented amount of audience data now available, pharma marketers have new op-portunities to leverage it to en-

hance their campaign strategies. From rede-fining segmentation approaches all the way to integrating precise measures of success, companies have the power to reach, engage, and analyze audiences like never before. While this data is an asset, challenges remain, including learning how to analyze and use it to influence marketing decisions.

In the March 6 webinar, “The rules have changed: How big data is redefining pre-cision marketing for the health industry,” Sarah Caldwell, VP, analytics services at Crossix, was joined by industry experts Erin Sebal, director, global customer insights, Merck; Ziv Yaar, partner, McKinsey & Co.; and Destry Sulkes, M.D., chief data officer, WPP Health & Wellness. Tackling the topic of big data’s imprint on the healthcare indus-try, they offered their personal views on strat-egies to identify and leverage the most valu-able data and analytics available.

Caldwell opened the discussion with a de-scription of the healthcare and pharma mar-keting data landscape, noting that as much as 30% of the world’s stored data is generated in the healthcare industry. The data tsunami presents both challenges and opportunities. Along with too much data, challenges include:

• Having incomplete data• The inability to connect data points• The lack of experience or expertise

to successfully mine and use data

But that influx of data also presents great opportunities for healthcare marketers.

Segmentation allows them to create better behavioral-based targeting, with messaging that is more precise to a specific audience.

It’s also now possible to measure market-ing effectiveness by segment and for brands to access it to create a clear picture of how to optimize their marketing investments.

BIG DATA’S IMPACT AND VALUEAgainst that backdrop, webinar participants shared their perspectives on where they see big data’s impact and greatest value.

Merck’s Sebal acknowledged that big data “enables us to do research a lot of times without doing primary research.”

More and more behavioral data is immedi-ately available, allowing marketers to match trigger patterns across large populations in a shorter period of time. Once you have that accurate picture of behavioral data, you can focus your time, energy, and finances to get to the why.

McKinsey’s Yaar pointed out real-world data informs many of the basic marketing functions happening today — from finding new patients, to treatments, to gleaning in-sights and understanding, and ultimately, getting patients to be more adherent.

For one client looking to improve adherence, Yaar reported that the data demonstrated a main factor influencing impact was whether or not the patient had kids under the age of 12 at home. Patients that fell into this category were much less likely to follow through with programs compared to other groups.

BRACING FOR THE DATA TSUNAMI

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Sarah Caldwell VP, analytics services

Crossix

Ziv YaarPartner

McKinsey & Co.

Erin Sebal Director, global

customer insightsMerck

Destry Sulkes, M.D. Chief data officer

WPP Health & Wellness

Big Data x mmm-online.com x 3

Armed with that information, the client adapted its strategy, ensuring patients that had young children were given extra support.

WPP’s Sulkes is seeing more alignment with market research versus creative versus media functions, which were traditionally more siloed. “There is a lot more breaking down of those silos. By having the creative strategist work with the research team di-rectly, we are able to get the better data to

answer more salient questions and under-stand more about motivations,” he explained.

BIG DATA’S INFLUENCESulkes also pointed to the importance of an emerging channel: wearables, such as Fitbits. All that data and interaction is creating a new channel, a new opportunity, he said, and “we have to figure out how to be a player in that new action, how to facilitate it, influence it, and make it work better to be a new service.”

“We have multifactorial, complicated business challenges that require data as well as collaboration,” noted Sebal. Agency relationships are not one-to-one anymore. Instead, “we as an industry have bionic teams of people working together to solve these complex challenges.”

But the influx of data also requires us to be smarter in how we interpret it, she asserted. You have to sort what is indicative of your product performance versus noise.

“There is a lot of noise in that real-time data, and if you take action based on it, it can lead to poor decisions or business out-comes,” Sebal said.

Even though we can access data quicker than before, we need to understand the data we’re looking at and think about what chan-nel is meaningful or is not, she added.

Caldwell agreed. “When you’re trying to glean insights, there can be a lot of noise, and you have to ask the right questions to see what’s actionable versus just interesting.”

Yaar offered an example that demonstrates “how when all cylinders are firing, data can truly have an earth moving effect.”

For a new product being released into the marketplace, McKinsey’s client had conducted a traditional chart poll survey

on which competitors’ products physicians were prescribing.

Based on the survey, the client rolled out its plan, but the product did not perform as expected, and it wasn’t reaching projec-tions. The real-world evidence team was brought in and collected claims and medical data to understand which drugs physicians were prescribing.

The data showed that the physicians were over-inflating their actual use of sophisticat-ed products, sharing their most interesting cases on the survey.

The client was not really competing with the latest and greatest products. It was real-ly competing against older products. Based on this real-world evidence data, the client overhauled its messaging and was able to get its actuals within 2% to 3% of its forecast.

Sulkes, looking on the physician side, not-ed, “with the data we have access to, we can really understand what the opportuni-ty is in each practice with a lot more clarity and visibility.”

Traditionally, deciling is used to target phy-sicians and create sales call plans, with the assumption that the higher deciles are where the biggest opportunities lie. “But when you start digging deeper into the claims data, that’s not necessarily true,” Sulkes explained.

For one rheumatology program, WPP found that the mid-level doctors that weren’t writing the most prescriptions actually had the greatest opportunity and highest patient load about to need a new script. Using this knowledge, “we were able to assign new deciles, as well as new value, ultimate per-sonal messaging, and channel approaches,” he said.

There are also newer strategies to reach HCPs, noted Caldwell. “From a media stand-point, HCPs can be targeted programmatical-ly just like what’s been done on the consumer side in pharma.” When it comes to the tradi-tional methods — such as deciling doctors based on new prescriptions and total pre-scriptions — there’s so much more informa-tion available that you can rescore physicians and use this to better target.

Sulkes added another challenge to the mix. Drug companies are faced with having to set up a data strategy across all of their brands and disease states, which may have much different data needs. How do you con-sult with each brand to use the right data and get the most value?

This speaks to a lot of the challenges mentioned earlier, said Caldwell. “There’s so much data, and the standards haven’t caught up. You see everything from a one-size-fits-all approach to one where everyone has their own set of requirements, which isn’t scalable,” she noted. “There is still much calibration that needs to be done in the industry.”

*Disclaimer: The purpose of this discussion is to share and generate ideas in the field of pharmaceutical market research. The subjects discussed today will help participants to strengthen their own companies’ independent market research efforts, thereby driving competition and better directing pharmaceutical products to the patients that need them. It is the intention of all participants to operate in strict compliance with all state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, antitrust laws. Nothing discussed in this conference is intended to limit each company’s ability or incentive to conduct whatever market research it thinks best, to establish standards for market research, to result in an agreement as to price or a division of customers, or otherwise to restrain competition. The views expressed in this presentation are the personal views of the author(s) and may not be understood or quoted as being made on behalf of or reflecting the position of Merck & Co., Inc. or any of its subsidiaries worldwide. Views are presented solely to aid discussion and should not be interpreted as company policy or guidance.

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