A new era of drugmaker influence: How the pandemic inspired pharma marketers to target doctors in novel ways

By Kate Kaye

When a new prostate cancer therapy is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it’s especially pertinent to a small group of oncologists. And for the last half-century or so, drug firms left it up to reps to make in-person sales calls to tell them about it.

But now, like a vaccine shot in the arm, the pandemic has given pharmaceutical marketers a fresh incentive to use digital advertising to influence what drugs doctors prescribe — even when patients are in the room and doctors are looking at their digital health records. And when those patients fill their prescriptions, the data on those lengthy receipts stapled to their pharmacy bags tells those drug makers whether their influence campaigns led to a prescription and drug purchase. But with digital health data and targeting comes privacy risk and implications for the costs of drugs.

“We’re now entering in a world where over the past 18 months, the customer, the hospital or the physician in the hospital have recognized that the reps only add a little bit of value but maybe not so much,” said Ritesh Patel, chief digital officer at Ogilvy Health, Ogilvy Group’s healthcare agency, which works with drug and medical device makers such as Pfizer, Novartis, GSK and Novo Nordisk. Meanwhile, Patel said, increased competition among drugmakers — “You can now have 10 products for a specific malady” — is pressing pharma brands to find other means of influencing doctors, such as through targeted advertising inside their work platforms.

Two key factors have spawned what could become a more sophisticated era of hyper-targeted digital pharma brand influence on physicians’ drug decisions, according to Patel: 1) the Affordable Care Act’s push for patients’ health care records to be digitized and 2) the realities of the pandemic that precluded drug sales reps from visiting doctors’ offices and hospitals.

‘Warming up the market‘

In late June, Ogilvy Health’s point-of-care division launched a strategic partnership with Doceree, a firm that offers demand- and sell-side ad tech for targeting pharma brand messages directly to specific physicians based on their identifiable doctor codes and health care platform login data. This, in addition to other data showing their medical expertise, prescribing history and even whether they prescribed a competitor’s drug a moment ago to a patient still in the room. The companies have spent the past year working together to develop complex business rules in the ad system for targeting display ads, pop-up text blocks or other messaging formats to doctors inside electronic health record systems.

The presence of ads inside these systems is not new, but the targeting and measurement capabilities are. Through partnerships with a web of electronic healthcare platforms and insurance and pharmacy data brokers, Doceree (pronounced like “doc-care”) can target ads based on a doctor’s previous prescription history coupled with the fact that she is viewing the health records of a patient with a particular disease and is using a prescription platform to write that patient a script for a specific drug.

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Source:: Digiday