The PharmaBrands Podcast
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The PharmaBrands Podcast
Aletta Brandle, Team Omnichannel Lead at Boehringer Ingelheim, on the Data-Driven Marketing Evolution Within Healthcare.
Data driven marketing (the term Aletta much prefers to “omnichannel”) is something a lot of brands and businesses are trying to get just right. In this episode Aletta shares her perspectives on what success looks like and how to drive meaningful behaviour change – hint: it’s about making the most of the channels and content available to a brand.
After you check out the episode, don’t forget to head to pharmabrands.ca to get your tickets for our June 17th Age of AI event in Toronto, before they sell out!
Our host is Neil Follett, Co-Founder of PharmaBrands and our Producer is Darryl Webster with Chess Originals
Good morning Aletta. Thanks for joining us. Good morning, I'm going to start with maybe a very simple but potentially very complicated question. Given you are the team lead of Omnichannel Excellence, how do you define Omnichannel, especially in pharma?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would love to know the history and where this word came from, like who started it, because I do feel like it's a trend and it's a trendy word that's been introduced and we've all just hung on to it. I mean, if you're actually going to define the word omni-channel omni meaning all or as many as possible, and channel, of course, being the channel through which you engage with your customer the concept in pharma is just using all of the channels that you have at your disposal, making them work together to deliver that customer experience. And I mean, pharma being what it is and being a rather old industry, it's just we've organically grown into what we are today, which is, from my perspective, in sort of the tech and the data and the marketing pieces, a bunch of platforms that have organically grown together, that are not always connected very well, but they all work together in some shape or form to deliver a customer experience, and we kind of have to make them work together however we can. And I think the challenges that we do have and why Omnichannel has come into existence, is it was originally a very rep driven industry and it still is. Sales reps are absolutely so important to pharma and how we engage with our customers, which are, which are physicians. But reps are not the only way and, especially as the entire world is evolving, we expect our customer experiences to occur through many different channels.
Speaker 2:So pharma industry has had to adapt and change the way, change from how we started many years ago. And Omnichannel is that concept to try and push the industry to use as many channels as possible, and we're not always doing it in the right way. I can tell you that, like from my previous experience in pharma when I was on the consulting side, we did have one, one client who brought us in to help them build an omni-channel strategy and we we saw things like a message being delivered 19 times through various channels, which is a lot and, yes, there is a certain number of times you need to see a message before you believe it. But that's the challenge that we do have in the industry with Omnichannel is, yes, it's all channels, but also don't overuse them, and I think that's kind of where we are now and what we're trying to figure out.
Speaker 1:To your point. It's all Omnichannel. These days Everybody's talking about Omnichannel and has been for a couple of years. And you multiply that one client or that one brand who pumps out their message 19 times by all of the brands that are targeting sort of certain groups of HCPs and it must get fairly overwhelming. I think on the customer side of things, when you've got omni-channel maybe not being done really well at scale, I think can probably be a bit overwhelming for the recipient.
Speaker 2:I think can probably be a bit overwhelming for the recipient. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, imagine you're a GP, like a family doctor. That is one of, I'm sure, by all pharma companies, the most widely targeted group of physicians, where they have a piece in so many different therapy areas, and I can imagine that they have a second email inbox where they send things that they don't want to receive, right, I've heard that.
Speaker 1:I've heard that from a lot of doctors.
Speaker 2:I've got my second email, or it goes to my assistant at the front, those types of things, because it's just too much.
Speaker 1:In 2025, maybe walk me through a scenario where it's Omnichannel at its best in pharma. Because, again, I think that if you asked even four different people with Omnichannel in their title, potentially, but definitely if you asked, I think, four different brand managers, you might get four different answers. When you push on okay, specifically, what is omnichannel so for you? Maybe give me an example of what is omnichannel done. Well, look like in 2025?.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, I'm trying to get away from using the term omnichannel.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, I'm just at the beginning of my journey here, but again, I think it's just a trendy word and I don't really think it captures what we need to be doing in the right way. Yes, all channels, but all channels how many times, to what end? And so I prefer and I've been trying to use the term data driven marketing, because if you look at another industry that's similar to pharma, the term omni channel doesn't exist, it's just marketing similar to pharma. The term omni-channel doesn't exist, it's just marketing. And the real key is using data to drive your marketing efforts so that you're ultimately choosing the right channel at the right time with the right message. And we've all heard that before and I think that's sort of the consistent answer you'd hear from any omni-channel expert in the pharma industry right channel, right message, right time.
Speaker 2:But omni-channel done well means, I mean I would say let's three things. The first thing is don't plan full customer journeys that have 25 different engagements and it's all one very linear experience, because I think historically as an industry we used to do that too complicated, too long, not agile. So the first thing is plan in small chunks, small behavior change efforts that can happen through four to five interactions, that can happen across any channel. So it's not just it must be a rep and then it must be an email and then it must be a website, but that is flexible. So planning in small, flexible chunks, what we like to call campaigns, and I'm sure that's pretty widely used. The second thing is have a measurement framework, and this is something that's critically important is understand what you're measuring and not just the sort of vanity metrics of okay, we've sent this many emails. Average CTR is this. We've got this many customers on our website, this many rep interactions. But you need a way to measure that's holistic. So how many customers are you moving through your campaign? What's moving them? What message, what channel? How are they responding to that? What's a geographic breakdown?
Speaker 2:So that's the second piece is measurement, and then the third piece is using the measurement and your analytics partner to make a change. So meeting regularly, reviewing that activity regularly and coming out with a so what? So not just looking at the data and saying, okay, great, wow, we're doing well, that's a high CTR, we're above average. But okay, where is the CTR lower? Why is it lower? What do we do about it? So, always coming out of those, I mean kind of like a, an agile meeting with an action that you're going to do in the next two weeks and then following up on that. And I think sometimes we wait too long to have these types of conversations until it's, you know, six months in, a year in, and we need to make those touch points a lot more frequent, make the measurements a lot more focus point and plan in smaller, more manageable chunks. So that's the perfect way to do an omni-channel I would say omni-channel planning in 2025. Amazing.
Speaker 1:If we go back and I will use data-driven marketing and not omnichannel, I'll try to do that for the whole rest of this conversation. It feels like there's maybe multiple points of friction for data-driven marketing in healthcare and I think about an example that is often used when talking about omnni-channel and which is, you know, this kind of starbucks ecosystem of connecting physical, digital, connecting your purchases back to crm, like you, you know, use the starbucks app to order your coffee and you go into the physical store because it knows where you are, and then you pick up your coffee and it's got a letter on the cup.
Speaker 1:actually, it probably has, like erica on the cup accidentally, um, and then know your points get updated automatically in the app and your emails are completely personalized based on your shopping behavior. And then at an individual level, you know there's tracking in terms of points, redemption and purchases and like all of this stuff. That really is a really big lift to stitch together. But when it is stitched together it can work really well. And then I kind of transpose some of that onto the pharma context and it feels like there may be three significant points of friction and I'm interested in what your thoughts on this are. So one is there's some channel friction, like we just don't have as many channels in healthcare and it's harder to connect the data. So then we have sort of a data problem across all those different channels because there's like a disintermediation that's happening.
Speaker 1:And then I think at the tail end of it all there's a bit of a content challenge as well, where pharma marketers are a little bit more constrained, let's say, when it comes to creating very differentiated content that's really appealing to the end user, and I think that they're constrained. One just it's hard to get content through pharma in general. There's maybe not as much to say on certain brands. It's really hard to sort of evolve and target that content. So it feels like there's this kind of channel, data and content points of friction. Do you see that? Is that what you feel in your day to day? Are there other pieces that I'm missing? Like, help me kind of zoom out a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the channel piece, I think, is I mean, I think it's a good thing that we don't have too many channels, because as an industry, we need to use the channels we have effectively. First and we're always trying and we're really great at that at Boehringer is what is out there that we don't know about. What can we learn about that doctors are using? How can we engage them in ways that are new and innovative? But I think the amount of channels we have is good for now and I'm happy with that, and I want to see us evolve the way that we use those with the website, making it dynamic, not static content. Email how can we be better at email and what is maybe a good alternative to email, because we may be doing it too much. But in the channel piece, I'm okay with it. The content piece you are absolutely right in that it's difficult because of the regulatory environment in Canada and, having worked in Europe and across the EMEA region seeing all of the different regulatory environments, I can absolutely attest to the fact that Canada is unique. It is difficult to get content through, it's difficult to get a lot of content through and it's also very expensive and time consuming. So we work with our amazing agency partners to do this, but to deliver content, personalized content, at scale. If you've got, you know, four physician specialties with maybe three to four segments within each of those specialties. That's a huge amount of content that you have to then prepare and submit to PAB to get PAB to approve it. And so I know that there's developments in how we're working with Pab and that there's modular content as well as an option, and down the road sometime I'm hearing about AI-driven content generation and approval as well, which is great, but all of those things just make it so difficult and I think, for marketers right, as Omnichannel, we don't own the content, and that's kind of our that's my line in the sand is we do not own the content, we help you deliver it, but marketers are trying to figure out how to create content at that scale and we we absolutely have have challenges doing that and and we're thinking a lot about modular content and how we can do that but there's the brain barrier of, oh, I don't know how to organize all of that. It's really going to be a lot of work and there's already so much work that happens and so much that marketers are doing that. That's just one more thing that creates challenge for them, especially in the adoption of that.
Speaker 2:Your third point data. Yeah, I think that's something that's coming into the equation more and more, and you're only as strong as your analytics team and as your data platform and this is when I'll bring up the topic of the CDP, which is a customer data platform and as an organization. This is something that's huge for us in Canada, huge for us globally, huge for the industry globally. But a customer data platform is essentially a platform that connects all of these different platforms. So, as I was saying at the beginning, pharma didn't start out the way that it currently was. We're not a new industry, we're certainly not a new organization, and so you need to kind of connect everything together from an omni-channel sense, so that you know if something's happening on this channel, how does that inform the next action on a different channel and how do you collect and organize that?
Speaker 2:Customer data organizations and pharma would do.
Speaker 2:This is okay.
Speaker 2:We know that these reps have had these interactions on this platform.
Speaker 2:We're going to download that interaction data, we're going to parse through it and select out only those interactions that were on topic X and Y, and then we're going to upload that to this platform, our email platform, where we're going to send out an email just to that list who received messages on topic X and Y, and so that's a lot of manual work.
Speaker 2:So the CDP essentially automates all of that. It connects your CRM, connects your website, connects your customer prescription data, connects your segmentation data, connects your content preferences, connects your event engagement data and it brings it all into one place so you have a holistic view of every single customer. This isn't what it looks like, but essentially you can imagine it as a giant Excel sheet with all of your customers and then all of the engagements that they've ever had, so that if you ever want to send an interaction or trigger a campaign based on a specific engagement, a specific topic, a specific behavior, then you can do that with the CDP. And I mean, I've got tons of examples theoretical and not about what that looks like, but yeah, that's sort of my long-winded answer to your three areas of potential challenges.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I got a yes, a no and a maybe, so that's a nice split. So, listening to you talk about the CDP is that something that is country specific? So your team sourced and kind of stitched all those pieces together. Is that something that global has developed and is kind of handed down to the regions? Like when I think about the challenge of data-driven marketing, there's obviously we talked a bit about content. You know you need to really understand that data there also is a, like a highly technical component to it. There's a strategic component, like there's kind of lots of different angles for this. So, just zooming in on the technical piece for a second, who built that? Is that your team? How does that come together?
Speaker 2:In a broad sense, I would say the CDP, the customer data platform should be the decision of whoever makes the tech decisions at your organization. So if you are one market amongst many markets, it's likely that your global team that sits above the markets is the one deciding what platforms the company is using across the world in order to engage with physicians right, Whether it's Viva, salesforce, whatever it may be. That team should also be the one making the decision about the CDP, because ultimately, the CDP is going to connect all of the web and engagement platforms together. So this shouldn't be a local decision unless you have your own local tech stack that you've decided locally 100%, because you're going to need to make decisions about what that CDP looks like and yeah, it's very technical and we are lucky to have an amazing team that works together with us to use the CDP, and so the omni-channel managers on my team have upskilled in that space to be able to understand how customer data is collected, how you can activate it, what that looks like, what writing a brief looks like, what that process is.
Speaker 2:But there are partners that we need to rely on for specific platform knowledge, like your CRM. You've got to use your CRM team for understanding all of the different data fields, the interaction data that comes from your CRM platform, and you also have to have that sort of IT team. We work a lot with IT to connect those data sources that may not be connected, and so we've had a wonderful experience working with our global team and bringing in a CDP. I've also heard from other pharma companies in the industry and other omni-channel team leads about yeah, we have a CDP, but we don't really know what to do with it, and so that was a watch out for me because, I have worked with in the consulting world, other pharma companies and brought in this idea and talked to them about it, but this was the first time internally that we were dealing with it.
Speaker 2:We really wanted to make sure that we bring it in and we keep it here forever, because this is a pillar in any other organization that uses tech and data, whether it's CPG, finance et cetera, and so this isn't going anywhere and it's got a very clear benefit and it solves some pretty big issues that the industry may be experiencing, depending on your organization. So it's super important and we're trying to make it the pillar of everything that we do.
Speaker 1:Well, and I imagine the more you use it and the cleaner the data and the more comfortable everybody is with it, the better you're going to get it. It becomes a bit of a flywheel where it becomes more and more and more key versus if you've got the marketing or the tech stack that you don't really know how to use and you never really use it and the data is not super clean and the division between kind of the data haves and have-nots gets just wider and wider.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, exactly, and it just becomes that natural way of thinking too. And I've seen it even just in the last couple of weeks. We were launching a new CDP use case, which I won't get into, but the responses are wait, you can connect all of that data together like, yeah, so it you know. To just give an example to contextualize what a CDP can do and this is a made-up example, but example, but imagine that it's a rep driven campaign that you have and the rep is supposed to talk to a physician about a specific topic, let's say efficacy data. So that rep has that interaction. Let's say they do a Viva call, it's a face-to-face, they're using an IVA or a CLM or however any I don't know, everyone uses a different term but you're using your CLM and when you're on page four, which is tagged with efficacy, that that interaction data is captured, it's sent to the CDP that this physician had the engagement, spent X amount of minutes on efficacy data. That goes to the CDP. The CDP is set up then because we've uploaded a specific campaign. It is then told to dynamically change the website based on this efficacy data interaction. So the rep would send a follow-up email after that interaction with the physician, that follow-up email after that interaction with the physician. That follow-up email would have, maybe like a graphic just recapping their conversation, some text from the rep. When the physician clicks on that email, they would be driven to our website and that website page would dynamically change and it would have some of that efficacy data on it.
Speaker 2:But it may also have patient profiles to support. This is the type of patient that you should be identifying so that you're having the biggest impact possible. And so you are, yes, touching on that message that has already been discussed, because that's relevant and it connects the point. But you're also building on that with these patient profiles, so you're driving that customer further down. Whatever your campaign funnel is towards that, that core objective and that could that interaction alone, those four steps that can be a campaign. If that gets you to whatever your behavior change objective is, then that would. That's an amazing example and historically, what you do, as I said, is like download an Excel, upload it here, trigger this, then trigger this, and that was all manual, but this is all automated, which is amazing.
Speaker 1:Let's take a second and talk about what's gone on before. You mentioned a few times that you've sort of come from the consumer world, that you had European experience. Maybe talk to me a little bit about how you got to where you are. What does your career look like up until now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, nonlinear.
Speaker 2:I did not always dream of being in pharma, but what I will say is I love being in pharma and in the healthcare industry as a whole. I love it so much and I would not go back to where I came from. But I started. Well, way back in the day I wanted to be a bacteria, so that was my first, my first job goal when I was very young yeah, I don't know, I'm not gonna say how young I was because that's not possible but I've always had an interest, let's say, in the science. Industry is where we start, yeah. But then changed my mind. No longer wanted to become a bacteria, but I went to McGill.
Speaker 2:I did my undergrad at McGill in international development and very, very different right, I wanted to be a refugee lawyer. I wanted to work in aid work. I worked at the Canadian Council for Refugees. I, yeah, I did four years of that, summer jobs preparing me to either go the lawyer route or work in foreign aid in some shape or form, and then wrote my LSAT once, wrote it again and then I was like this is not for me, I am not going to do well as a lawyer I don't think I can do it, which was good.
Speaker 2:So, total pivot I became a flight attendant Air Canada Rouge and I know whoever listens to this or you're probably having a reaction yourself because everyone loves to hate on Air Canada Rouge but Air Canada Rouge was launching and they were hiring flight attendants for their vacation airline. I mean very cool. They had a whole makeup routine, they had very cool outfits a very cool concept. The marketing drew me in and I mean, being a flight attendant couldn't be cooler. So I just did that for a year. I was like, ok, let me, let me do something in between my bachelor and my, my master's. And and during that time when I was a flight attendant, I was visiting a friend often in San Francisco and she was doing her master's in marketing.
Speaker 2:Um, I didn't really have any marketing experience prior to this other than like content writing. I was obsessed with food and food and restaurants. So I was doing a little bit of that on the side and thought maybe I'd go into food blogging and content marketing or into airline marketing was actually the dream, spinning my flight attendant career into that. But no, I went, did my master's, lived in San Francisco for a year and then worked in an agency, worked on food clients and then ended up at the Globe and Mail. Still not in pharma, yet I am loving this.
Speaker 1:I am literally loving this so far. So yeah, unexpected twists and turns, yeah a lot.
Speaker 2:Yes, but I mean, maybe the agency piece is the constant from then on is I was always in sort of this agency like role where you're servicing and supporting other people to do, you know at that point, social media and digital marketing. So email, pinterest, instagram, all of that stuff. I was the first person to bring Johnsonville sausage onto Instagram and Pinterest, so that was a big, a big moment.
Speaker 1:I would say so, I'm surprised. I'm surprised that we didn't open with that fact.
Speaker 2:I know, yeah, it should be my headline on LinkedIn. So, yeah, the Globe and Mail. And then I made the decision to leave the Globe and Mail. I loved working at the Globe and Mail Amazing team just like very open to doing things differently and trying influencer marketing for content in the Globe of Mail in print. And, like content creators love that. They're like I've never been in print before. Everything's digital. So it was. It was a really cool space to just kind of do a lot of things that I never had the chance to try out. But I decided to move to Germany. I'm, I'm, half German, my mom's from Germany, so I've got a German passport and needed to use that. So the thought was let's go to Berlin for a year. My boyfriend at the time now husband was like no way you go, I don't, that's crazy. He came around.
Speaker 1:He's now my husband. Sounds like it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and came with me. We quit our jobs crazy, found new jobs there and ended up in Berlin for about a year, moved to Frankfurt because my husband got a job in Frankfurt and his organization introduced me to McCann Health and they then hired me. So I became a strategist at McCann Health on pharma clients in German. At McCann Health on pharma clients in German. Yes, I am German, yes, I speak German, but do I speak pharma language in German? Absolutely not. Have I ever worked in German?
Speaker 1:No, I remember when I went from kind of traditional agency and I was the general manager of an agency that had primarily pharma clients, I couldn't speak pharma in English. So not only are you trying to be a strategist in another language, you're trying to be a strategist in another language that is working in an industry that has its own language. That's a pretty crazy hill to climb.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it was a lot. I was Googling all of the time and, yeah, we didn't. I didn't have, uh, I didn't have AI at that point. I had Google translate, um, but it was. It was a challenge but I made it.
Speaker 2:And I mean I ended up working within the IPG health network, or IPG um, at various agencies and various roles for four years. So there was about two years of that in Frankfurt and then I had the opportunity to work remotely from Portugal. I was working on a fully remote team. So I worked from Portugal for two years and was able to go back and forth to London, uk, where the majority of my team was located. And that's, those two years was the point. We started an agency within the network called Solved, and Solved is a data-driven marketing agency where we were consulting pharmaceutical clients on how to build omni-channel data-driven marketing concepts within their organization, but at the global level, right. So we're helping them build those sort of ecosystems, engagement, planning strategies, to utilize omni-channel planning techniques. And I was the VP, head of media, which was crazy, a crazy title, a crazy experience being able to build an agency from the ground up with my, with a few other colleagues, and it went amazingly well, and one year turned into five.
Speaker 1:And just just to be clear, you're you're the VP head of media for Europe. Like, not a country, like a yes, an entire continent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when I say I know the regulatory environments of many different countries, well I do. You know working on I worked on a COVID-19 vaccine at that point and regulatory was changing like, honestly, every single week and so we had to change our strategy based on the regulatory environment. So it'd be like, oh, we're going to be investing a million in this country over the next six months in straight media and then, nevermind, the regulatory environment is not going to allow us to do that. We've got to reduce it to 250K.
Speaker 1:It was crazy, but, yeah, it a a very interesting experience I'm sure it was sort of getting your phd and omni channel uh in a very short period of time, like that's a, that is a uh, a very complex environment to be working in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you're standing, when you're sort of standing that up to begin with, right, yeah, yeah, and I mean, being in the IPG network was great, having so many connections to different clients and across the globe. It was so, so fun and I miss that team dearly. It was an amazing experience but, yeah, had to head back home eventually, I guess.
Speaker 1:What brought you back? What had you say hey, I think it's time to go back to Canada.
Speaker 2:Well, my husband wanted to come back to do his MBA, so he came back earlier than I did and we actually were living apart for just a little less than a year because I had good things going on over there and he had great things going on over here. So we made that decision and I didn't. I'm not the type of person who can move without a job, yeah, so I actually, when I went to Berlin at the beginning of this journey, I had a job before I even got there, because that not the type of person who can move without a job. So I actually, when I went to Berlin at the beginning of this journey, I had a job before I even got there, because that's the type of planner that I am, and that was the same scenario coming back. I could not quit without something in my pocket, and so I truly.
Speaker 2:It took about a year to find something, and I knew that I wanted to go to the client sides in that case. So to the pharma side, to a pharma company, because I've seen the outside of a lot of pharma companies, but I also felt that I could bring a lot to the inside of a pharma company, and so eventually, this opportunity at Boringer came up and I was able to use that as my way to come back to Canada, and so now we've been back in Toronto for just a little over a year.
Speaker 1:Thank you. That was amazing. Very few of those questions when I ask people how did they get to where they are? Involve both a potential law degree and a bit of a stint as a flight attendant and the dream to become a bacterium and the dream to become a stint as a as a flight attendant so, and the dream to become a bacteria and the dream to become bacteria.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry I didn't go all the way back to the. Really, you know the origins of it all. As a bacteria, what was it like going from agency side to pharma side, like going inside? What surprised you about that move, or what didn't surprise you? How was it?
Speaker 2:I still learn a lot every single day and I think, being on the agency side, we feel like we know a lot, but we really only know the half of it, because there's so much going on inside of these organizations and the way that the customer facing teams, like the MSLs and the sales reps, the way they work and operate.
Speaker 2:You can't know that unless you sit down with them, listen to them, hear their stories, go into the field, and so that's a huge piece, of course, and also just the breadth of everyone who works at the organization, from legal, regulatory, medical marketing like your clinical development and operations team. There's so many pieces and so I was just trying to figure out what every single word meant. We love a good acronym in this industry, so still trying to figure out when each organization has their own set of acronyms, like when CLM and IVA I'm still I use all of them all at once because I never know who's using which term. But it was a learning experience and I I knew I didn't know everything and I still don't know everything and I never will. But the big piece of it was kind of the sales force and learning more about them and how they operate and I had the opportunity to go out into the field and just watch and see how that works. And that's really important for this team as a whole and any omni-channel team because you're essentially servicing the medical and marketing colleagues is be empathetic to how those customer facing teams operate, because they're also going to. They could be the ones who are the quickest to sort of not believe in you, because you are the digital team and they are the in-person customer engagement team. Right and realistically, as I said, we're the glue. We need to work with them because what they do feeds what we do. So that was the biggest learning.
Speaker 2:But the great piece that I love so much is those first six months, or even three months, when you come into an organization and you're seeing everything for the first time. Those are the critical moments where you come up with your best ideas and you're seeing everything for the first time. Those are the critical moments where you come up with your best ideas and you bring in new pieces of information because you haven't gotten comfortable with the ways of working, and so I try to hold on to that. Even a year in is not take things for granted and just say that's the way we do it. But it's like why do we do it that way? Can't we do it another way? Continuously challenging, like why do we do it that way? Can't we do it another way? Continuously challenging. That's why I love new people with new mindsets and different ways of thinking, because that's where you get your best ideas.
Speaker 1:I think that's such an important point.
Speaker 1:I used to say when we would have new team members join, I would say to them in, like, in the early days, like this is the time where I need you to speak up the most. Not that I don't want you to speak up later, but there's this I think there's a tendency when you're new in an organization to sort of be you know, I'm see something that you don't understand. Ask about it Because you know one. There's a chance that, like, it is kind of dumb, but we've all just gotten used to it, and so it's really important to hold a mirror up and have us be like oh, that's kind of dumb, let's change it. But if there is a really good rationale behind it, we can explain that. You know you, as a new person, will learn that a little bit, and we can also kind of put our finger on the scale a little bit and and see, does it still make sense? We used to think it made sense. Like, I think those early days are so important. So it's really interesting that you say that yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1:And I will. I will. I will point out that in one of your previous answers you did highlight that, hey, agency people, maybe you don't know all the things that you think you know. It is a different world. So many times over my years of working with clients, there were moments where clients would explain something that they were doing outside of the stuff that they were doing with us, and it it was always this moment of like oh, like, you do that too, like it's a. There's a lot of pieces to a lot of those roles that don't overlap with what the marketing agencies are doing, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I and I I thought I was going to be a shoo-in, like getting getting a job on the client side, and it it't, and totally fair that it wasn't. I do think that sometimes it's harder than it needs to be for non-pharma or, let's see, you know, pharma agency people to get into the pharma companies because they do really value that sales experience and rightly so. Right, the interactions with physicians in that one-to-one sales environment is really important and it drives the business. But I think there are ways to gain that experience, that exposure, after you have joined an organization and that there are so many other skills and experiences from individuals in non-pharma companies that could really really help our industry.
Speaker 1:And are you seeing it more and more that there is an appetite on behalf of pharma to bring in folks from outside? I would say that you know I've been doing this for a long time and for most of that long time it was incredibly rare that you would have someone come from sort of quote, unquote the outside. It feels like it's becoming a bit more common and actually those kind of outside in perspectives are more welcome. Are you noticing that as well?
Speaker 2:I noticed that within myself. So when I'm hiring which I have done quite a bit of in the last year since joining Boringer Ingelheim I always encourage our team that I work together with the recruiters to send me everything, even if you don't think it's a good fit, especially, I mean, in certain cases when there's no pharma experience. I'm very interested in looking at those types of applicants and seeing what can they learn about pharma and what can they bring to the interview even though they have no idea about the industry. Right, like there are explanations of our organization, what we do, products, pab might not be perfect, but if you can come to that interview and have done research, that's amazing and that goes a long way. And and I don't I don't think I can comment on whether the industry is changing as a whole, cause I think I don't really know. I haven't been out there in the hiring process as somebody who's applying and in over a year. But yeah, I hope the industry is changing and I have this conversation with as many people as I can and trying to promote non-pharma applicants as valuable employees. And I do know some people who've come from non-pharma into pharma and they've done amazing things in the industry, and so I try to keep that mindset myself.
Speaker 2:And like I had someone do an interview and they said well, I just called up my uncle, who is a doctor, and he told me all about how he interacts with pharma companies. And so I understood from that perspective, and to me that's like holy crap, you're motivated, you're interested, you're prepping for an interview in the exact right way, and that's exactly the type of thing I would expect you to do in your day today work as well. So that to me, was a very green flag.
Speaker 1:I'm going to switch gears. Let's look forward a little bit. What do you see? Obviously, tons of talk about AI and AI transforming everything from content to data. Like you mentioned, the content part of it. I think that there is a steep still adoption curve for true kind of data-driven marketing in pharma, but I'm seeing lots of organizations like yours moving pretty quickly up that curve. As you look forward I don't know this year, next year, I don't know how far forward you can look these days but if you look forward, where do you see things changing, or where are you hopeful that things are going to change?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know. So this is. I'm kind of still in the same mindset as I was when we did the Age of AI conference last year, but it primarily for my team. At this moment, where we are with our current tech stack and the way that we operate, it is first and foremost an efficiency tool for us. So I always encourage my team to think about can I use AI in this instance to make this work less monotonous, to make it quicker, to make the output better? So, for example, we have, of course, our internal instances of AI that are safe to use with any of our content, but using that to even just start briefs and start creating segmented content, so creating emails based on customer profiles one for this customer type, one for this customer type, one for this customer type. If you've got an email template, can it help you kind of just spit all ideas and get the brief ready for the agency in a way that's more efficient? Or can you help it? Or can you use it to help you build a measurement framework for a campaign? So you might have an idea about how you want to do something. But can it maybe visualize that measurement framework so that when you go pitch it to your team, you've got something actually tangible for them to look at, rather than just some words on the slide. So we really use it just for, like brainstorming, building pitches, building ideas, data analysis as well. You can use it for customer segmentation as well, to do quick segmentation based on criteria Other than that for us in our current world in the next year, that's going to be how it continues.
Speaker 2:For us, I think the tagging can be AI driven right. So rather than having to manually insert your tags to all of your content, you can use AI to automatically tag and then use it. Just use a human for validation. So that's something that's probably low hanging fruit. Anything with PAB or regulatory review regulatory review that's also low hanging fruit that most teams would be very open to. To reduce that time spent reviewing, if it can flag beforehand, before even getting all the way down the medical legal review process, those sort of things. But those are all again efficiency related, right, cutting out things that are done by humans that don't need to be so time heavy. And then, of course, five years down the road, automatically creating content, delivering content and driving the customer journey based on all of the learnings that it's getting from customer engagement data, but I don't think we're there yet, but we're absolutely interested in getting there.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you mentioned MLR.
Speaker 1:I just came back from our Age of AI Europe event and I'd say 25% of the day was spent talking about MLR efficiencies platforms that are being stood up to create efficiencies in MLR and just how inefficient that process is right now and how, by creating some efficiencies, that alleviates and it unlocks, like really quite valuable bandwidth to an organization.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, I do think that your point about is it five years from now or a little bit less or a little bit more that the almost seamless content generation and delivery, and also, I think, probably on the other side of it is for your HCPs, who are really engaged, a different kind of self-serve where they can interact with brands and with pharma companies in a compliant way, with a little less friction and with some more impact too. Yeah, yeah, okay. So to sort of take us to the end of the conversation, what is it that you've got that you maybe even can tell us about that you're most excited about right now, as we come out of the winter and into the spring you mentioned you're most excited about right now, and as we come out of the winter and into the spring, you mentioned you're launching some new use cases. What do you have you know on your to-do list that you're excited about?
Speaker 2:Well, first I'm taking three weeks off and going to Japan, so I'm pretty excited about that Amazing we should have spent more time there.
Speaker 1:I've had a bunch of friends that have gone to Japan recently and all of them have come back just raving about how amazing it is yeah.
Speaker 2:So if you want to do an entire episode on Japan travel tips and itineraries, we can do that when I'm back.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, I'm actually standing up the new the Aletta Travel Podcast. Perfect, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Perfect?
Speaker 2:No, but other than that, I think it's just really evolving our tech stack and the CDP.
Speaker 2:Now that we have it, how can we use it to better drive customer engagement across all of the channels, including the customer facing team, and I'm really excited about what I can learn from other organizations and how I can bring that back to the team from other organizations and how I can bring that back to the team.
Speaker 2:I chat with other omni-channel data excellence leads in the industry and we sort of swap learnings in ways that we can that are compliant, of course, but we need to share with each other which, as an industry, we're kind of afraid to share with each other, because of course, there is a ton of information we cannot share. But there are also conversations that we can have at a higher sort of strategic level or a tech level that I want to engage more in those discussions, and that's why I also think conferences are great, because that's your opportunity to engage in that way. But I've been trying to take the conference model and do that in my own life outside of conferences as well, and so just learning more about that, but also learning from other industries, industry and sort of swap stories and swap approaches, because we are sort of, maybe where a CPG company was 10 years ago, and so there are things that we can learn from them and how they're using data-driven marketing to engage with our customers that we could pull over into our industry.
Speaker 1:Well for what it's worth. I wholeheartedly agree. I think that there is an absolute ton that we can share. I also think conferences are pretty cool and I think that there's more that we can share than we know right. I think that there's a tendency, in healthcare especially, to think that kind of everything is a people who are comfortable to, I imagine, both share their success stories and also talk openly about the roadblocks. That's the rising tide. I think that's going to float kind of all the boats for sure. If people want to reach out, obviously they can go through LinkedIn, but are you comfortable sharing your email address If there are folks that are, you know, dated, omni-channel excellence people or people who want to be part of that larger conversation that you're having?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I would share my email, but it's so long like boring or Ingelheim every time I have to write that out. So if you're going to ask me to spell my email right now. It might be embarrassing, so I'm going to say definitely, linkedin is always safe.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, you mentioned sharing, and I will say I really appreciate you sharing your stories today with me, and also you mentioned learning, and I've learned a ton. This has been a really, really interesting conversation, so thank you for your time and thank you for sharing.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you for having me. This was my first podcast and I loved it.