The PharmaBrands Podcast
The Canadian healthcare marketing industry is full of personal, impactful, and fascinating stories. The PharmaBrands Podcast is proud to celebrate these stories from people, brands, organizations and businesses who are making a difference.
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The PharmaBrands Podcast
David Churchill, VP, Healthcare Business Strategy, Lemieux Bédard on Change, Challenge and the, "New and Different."
David Churchill’s career in healthcare sales, marketing and communications has been powered by curiosity and a lot of hard work. Over 20 years, and increasingly senior roles, in medical device, pharma and agency have given David a unique perspective that he brings to bear on his team and clients. In this episode he shares his perspective and passion as he tells his personal story, talks about what makes Lemieux Bédard different and gives us a peek into the future of healthcare marketing.
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
Welcome to the Pharma Brands Podcast. I'm your host, neil Follett, and thank you for giving the show a listen. It would be very lonely here without you. In this episode, we're continuing the tradition that we started, like one episode ago, where we talked to leaders who made the jump from industry to agency. I was really looking forward to chatting with today's guest, david Churchill, vp Healthcare Business Strategy at Lamebada. Chatting with today's guest, david Churchill, vp Healthcare Business Strategy at Lamebado. David has always struck me as a curious, committed, lifelong learner. In this episode, he shares insights around thriving in a state of change, challenging yourself and embracing the new and different. Here's my conversation with David Churchill. David, thank you for joining me this afternoon.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:We've got a lot of ground to cover, because you've been doing this for a while and you've been on both the client side and the agency side. Let's start with the industry side and go back to where it all began. How did you start your career in healthcare?
Speaker 2:That's a fun question. It's one that people don't ask because they're scared. I'm going to answer it. So I'm glad you did ask me we. It's one that people don't ask because they're scared. I'm going to answer it.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad you did ask. We can edit. That's the thing. I can ask anything?
Speaker 2:It all started a long time ago. In fact, I wasn't earmarked or I didn't think about ending up in the healthcare industry at all Maybe a little strange, given that my father is a physician, my mom is a nurse. But actually I studied population demographic geography when I was in university and had a lot of interest in how cities were built and how populations migrated and congregated within cities and ended up doing a master's degree in urban and regional planning. So the big plan was for me to be an urban planner, creating beautiful cityscapes and what have you had a great job actually at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing back in 1995, before along came the Mike Harris government and I do have to say thank you to him for not extending contracts which put me out of a job at the time which was
Speaker 2:a horrible feeling but probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. From that I ended up going back to school to study some business. But while I was doing that, a friend of my father's, who I knew as a squash partner, didn't really know what he did. One day he said would you ever be interested in working for me? And we got into a great conversation about what he did. And he was a national sales manager for a hemodialysis company and after a few conversations on and off the court I said yeah, I'd be interested. And the rest is history. From there I ended up taking on a sales role covering Ontario, manitoba and Newfoundland in hemodialysis sales, which I had. Number one no experience in hemodialysis. Number two no experience in sales.
Speaker 2:A winning combination, oh yeah a real winner, but it did turn out really, really well. I hated it for about every day of the first year, but then something clicked and I found it an absolute wonderful thing spending time in hemodialysis units. And there was a particular feature of the hemo machine that we had at the time at the company I was with that I gravitated to and it's one that could make the patient's dialysis session much more comfortable and better for them and it became my specialty and it opened up the doors for me to travel coast to coast when there were evaluations or training sessions. And after that I was hooked. When I'd go to global meetings with the company, I'd be in the booth and other people would know that this was my specialty and they'd bring their doctors from South America to come and have me demonstrated in the booth for them. And that was what it was. I got hooked right at that point I knew I was never leaving, whether it be the med device industry or the pharma industry. So that's where it all started.
Speaker 1:So was that sort of back in that hemodialysis days? Was that a technical sale, or was it a scientific sale, or was it a little bit of both? I'm always amazed at folks who have come from a world that is not based in science to then move into a world where they're selling science. They need to be compelling about it. Was it a baby step, because it was a combination of the technology and the science, or what was that first kind of entry like?
Speaker 2:It was a great experience because I didn't know it while I was doing it. It's one of those things you don't know what you're learning while you're learning. But when you're selling hemo, there's a lot of science involved. Of course, anatomy of the patient understanding what's going on in the patient was important as well, specifically with this feature that I really gravitated to. But it's probably the ultimate place to learn how clinical, financial and organizational things come together, the sort of CFO, because when you're going and selling this, you can get a nurse very interested in the device you're selling and the doctor doesn't know about it and they don't care, or the purchasing person doesn't know or care they don't care, or the purchasing person doesn't know or care, or the nurse manager or the chief tech doesn't really understand.
Speaker 2:So you'd really have to find a way to heighten all of the different features and benefits of the device and how it would fit into the overall system. Operationally it's going to be better for these following reasons Financially, it's going to help you save in terms of maybe nursing time or tech time, as well as clinically for the patient. So you couldn't just get one person on board, you had to get the entire organization on board. So you really have to think a little bit differently maybe than traditionally, maybe in pharma because I've done that too where you're really going in and it's more of a one-on-one discussion with a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist so it's a completely different way of doing things yeah, that's really interesting that you actually added in the third dimension that I hadn't thought about or asked about, which is that there's a whole business part of the sale when you're selling equipment too.
Speaker 1:You mentioned pharma. I'm going to jump on that and ask how did you go from your med tech device hemo world into pharma? What was that transition like?
Speaker 2:That was. You know I had been doing the pharma sales thing and then I was able to make the transition into marketing. Baxter Healthcare bought the smaller dialysis company that I was with, and when they did buy that, I took the opportunity to get some marketing experience in medical device, which was a really great experience. But at that point I about 2002, I started thinking you what I should really do some pharma stuff or biotech. I'd be interested in learning that and I actually took a jump into sales again. So I left my marketing role at Baxter and joined Amgen Canada in 2002 as a sales specialist in the area of nephrology, so staying within the kidney realm, which is where I spent the majority of my career.
Speaker 2:And worked in sales in nephrology at Amgen I think it was about three years before I transitioned my way back into a marketing role at Amgen it was a role back then I don't think it exists anymore as medical marketing manager, so very focused on science and education, less about product. But over the course of time I moved into a couple of the products that we had in the renal division. Before making a decision, you know what I better do something other than nephrology in my life or I'm really going to get you know.
Speaker 2:That's all people are going to know me for. So I made a leap over to oncology within Amgen and it was a wonderfully challenging experience. A whole new world In all. I just have to say my experience at Amgen was really world class. The people I worked with there. I'm still friends with the majority of them today, longstanding friendships that I think will never end. We learned a lot together. We had some great products, but yeah, that's how I made the transition over to the pharma world.
Speaker 1:Are there kind of moments that stick out for you now when you look back and say you know, these were the really important skills I picked up in different spots along the way, or these were the these moments that I sort of keep going back to in my career as you're now over on the on the agency side and are in a again a very different position and perspective Like what were key learnings for you in that, in that time?
Speaker 2:So many.
Speaker 2:I think, back in the medical device day. I remember one particular dialysis machine evaluation that our company was not invited to, and I got a call from one of the members of that hospital and said I don't think it's fair that your company was excluded, but there's a tender that's gone out for devices and they encouraged me to bid on it anyhow. And so I did up the RFP response and went down and delivered it to under the door of the procurement manager and, lo and behold, we were invited to participate in the pitch where you would go in and they would evaluate your machine for about a month.
Speaker 2:So for about a month I was traveling, I think it was about a two hour drive almost every day to there and back, spending the entire day. Day to there and back, spending the entire day, and slowly but surely won over a lot of the nurses and the technologists in this account when we weren't even supposed to have been invited.
Speaker 2:And I think that's where I really learned what I was talking about earlier, in that you have to get at least everybody on board to a certain degree. And there was a grouping there, you know. Some of the nephrologists were very on board with it. One of them wasn't, and that nephrologist had a disproportionate amount of power in the unit and I knew it and I knew I wasn't going to convince them, but I thought I, if I want everybody else, is going to be able to get the business and in the end I didn't. But it's one of those, you know. Insert book title. Here.
Speaker 2:Some days you learn some some days, you win some days you learn yeah, I learned more from that experience, that loss, about what you need to do to be able to, um, to close the deal. Essentially, that you can't leave any stone unturned and just hope it's going to go your way.
Speaker 1:That was a huge eye-opener for me, also so interesting that you would never even have had that eye-opener were it not for the tenacity of I'm going to slip an uninvited RFP under a door. There's a bit of a combo there, I feel like you know. One is, you know you don't always have to sort of wait for the invite and then and then two, yeah, you got to get everybody on board.
Speaker 2:That's. It wasn't all for a loss, because that that nephrologist did say to me after he said you know you were a real pain in my ass and you made this really difficult for me and I said I hope so, but he you know, when you're working for a company like that, you have multiple products and he bought a lot of other products from you which were good and we did get a lot of business there. We just didn't get the really really big one. But we won his support in a different way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean I'm sure you know it from the agency side of things you know sometimes like you never want to lose, want to lose, but if you make it a really, really tough decision and you end up not being awarded the business, you're typically going to leave a really good impression and will probably, to your point, make a sale in another way or get a call a year and a half later and somebody really remembers you.
Speaker 2:Definitely. Now another example on the ph, and I just told the story yesterday, so it's fresh in my mind when I was working in sales for Amgen, there was a dialysis unit nephrology program who was trying to get thousand patients over to the drug I was selling. And so I, you know I walked out of that center thinking I was the king, the greatest sales rep that ever lived, and I could do no wrong and felt great for the weekend. And then I went to another dialysis center the next week and I delivered the exact same pitch story to them that I had the other clinic and they said, yeah, we'll give you some of your subcutaneous patients, we'll do a little bit, which was still something. But I thought what, what? How could they say no to me?
Speaker 1:This doesn't make sense. Don't they know what a good salesperson is Exactly? And it.
Speaker 2:Just you know I always remember that that you have. You have to speak differently, and this is where segmentation really reared its beautiful head to me is that you have to speak to the people who are sitting in front of you, not say the same thing the same way all the time. What's important to one is not important to another, and your product or your service may be exactly the same, but the way that they're going to look at it and receive it is going to be different. So changing the way something is presented and preparing to do so is so important. So that was a huge eye opener for me as well.
Speaker 1:I think there's people that can have the win and then spend the weekend and then go into the next pitch and not get the win, but not also walk out with that insight. What do you attribute that rise in your career and success in those roles? Do you feel like you've got an innate sense of curiosity? Is it a different kind of striving? What is it that drove you and differentiated you in those years, which I'm sure is the same kind of fundamentals as now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you probably nailed the curiosity and reflection on why things went your way or didn't go your way. That plays a huge role. I think a lot of people listening to the podcast right now live that every day too and wonder if they're not, if they don't win the business, why exactly was that? What could they have done differently? But I think curiosity is a big one and I think also that reflection at certain points in the career where you're going.
Speaker 2:I'm enjoying what I'm doing, for sure, but how much further do I want to go at this right now and am I going to challenge myself to do something completely new and different, to bring it to a higher level?
Speaker 2:So you know, things were great at Amgen. Like I said, I absolutely loved it there. But then Baxter Healthcare came calling again and they were going to be launching a new home hemodialysis device and a few other things and I was drawn to go over there as director of marketing, not because I'm particularly drawn to want to manage a department or anything, but I thought you know what time to get uncomfortable again and learn a little bit and see where you can take it. Because you know, you, you, you went away from Baxter and you learned a lot about biopharmaceuticals and biotech products and all this other stuff. Can you take that learning to Baxter and take it to a higher level? So I think it is all about the challenge yourself at different points in your career to make yourself a little bit uncomfortable and continue learning. And I'm not somebody who finds, you know, even within the agency of people challenge me. I love it, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Love if people challenge as long as it's appropriate, no throwing things or anything you know not that anybody would in our agency, but but a good challenge is when you're going to get better. It's like when you go in and you're meeting with a physician or any client and they have an objection. That's awesome. That's where you're actually going to make some movement and learn some things, and that's something that I embrace rather than shy away from.
Speaker 1:Well, going back to your sort of segmentation insight of the early days, their objection is that segmentation come to life because they're going to be objecting from the point of view of their unique vantage point Absolutely yeah. So what was it like moving over to be director of marketing and you talked about that you didn't necessarily wake up in the morning and say, okay, I'm dying to run a division, although that there's really interesting learning there. It's a very different challenge, right, being a very strong, curious marketer, even at a senior level, is a very different thing than managing marketers and being, you know, maybe one step removed from the work and you're dealing with team dynamics and a bunch of stuff Like what was that? What was that shift like?
Speaker 2:It was interesting. It was also going through a time where Baxter had purchased another global company that was focused on hemodialysis, so they were being integrated into the company and I had even though they had been competition for years I had always had a very good relationship with the competition. Ultimately, we're all vying for the same thing and it's nicer to be friends with people than otherwise, and in that regard, it was really fun in terms of the group of people that were there.
Speaker 2:In terms of being a level removed away from the front line. I think you nailed it. I did not like that very much I like being involved.
Speaker 2:I like being involved in the grassroots market research and the development of strategy. Working with the team, I did love seeing members of the team grow and get better and get promoted, and they've moved on to other companies or stayed within the Baxter environment. I did enjoy that, but it was not entirely for me being a hundred percent honest, and that's probably why I stayed there about three years only because I craved being more in the trenches.
Speaker 1:Thinking about the early days of going from the industry side to the agency side. Were there moments of oh wow, this is not as I expected, or any surprises Like talk to me about the decision to go over to the other side and then what the initial period was like?
Speaker 2:The original owner of the agency, cezanne Lemieux-Bedard, contacted me shortly after I left Baxter. I had been a client of Lemieux-Bedard for about 15 years, so I was well known by the agency and they to me as well.
Speaker 2:So there was a good working relationship and she just contacted me for a conversation to see about how I was and and what my future plans were, and she she mentioned a role at the agency that she thought would be one that I I would do well at if I was interested, and it was really focused on the the science side, the medical writing team strategy. She just called it sort of like the director of health at the time and yeah it very quickly, I would say within a couple of weeks, we had a had a deal for me to join the agency and the transition actually was remarkably easy, probably because I knew 90% of the players there already the account directors and the upper administration. Of course, the early days were very much. It was hit the ground running, as you're not surprised, and it was very much focused on one client and really getting up to speed on the science and the strategy. So there really wasn't any sort of I'm just learning it, it's just a way you go.
Speaker 2:Um, no real surprises and maybe it's cause I kind of knew the agency and I you know I'd worked with a number over the years and I there was no secret behind the curtain and, in fact, that's one of the things that I really liked about the agency was that there were no surprises. The way that they were taught, they talked to me as a client, or the way that they talked to each other, uh, within the walls. I was impressed by the amount of diligence that went into all the work to study the brands, to understand, and then the internal meetings to strategize and come up with tactics. It was very much exactly what I had imagined it would be and it should be. So it wasn't a hard transition, and I was thinking about it the other day that it's already been over eight years.
Speaker 1:I was going to say you must be enjoying it more than Baxter because you're eight plus years in. It's a busy and complicated agency space out there. There's lots of room for lots of players. But maybe talk a little bit about how you see you know your agency being differentiated from others that you go up against. You know where you kind of see your sort of key points of leverage. And then, yeah, maybe a bit of reflection on what the last little stretch has been like, as I think you know, healthcare marketing is changing but isn't changing and it's always not changing, it's always changing. It's it's, it's, it's interesting. So let's go to. If somebody had to ask you sort of you know, how would you describe the agency and and where it's, where it's differentiated?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a. It's an agency that's been around for over 35 years and, as I mentioned, suzanne Lemieux-Bédard is the creator of the agency. She retired a few years ago. But one of the beautiful things is the agency remains 100% independent and I believe it's the largest independent agency in Canada right now, with a focus on creative digital service as well as translation. We are an agency based in Quebec. We do have a large translation division, which is a major differentiator for us. In fact, I'm not included in this, but the agency thinks bilingually.
Speaker 2:I can speak Newfoundlander, I can speak English but, I cannot really speak French all that much, but I've got a heck of a team that I can rely on over there. One of the things, though, is that we're now well over 100 employees. However, the company remains really committed to providing a human touch service. That's more expected from a boutique type of agency. We're not really committed to it for the sake of doing it, but that's just who the people are. When we actually look at our president of the ad agency side, as well as on the translation side, both of them have been with the agency over 25 years, which is, as you know, an eternity in the agency world, and in fact, there's a lot of people on the teams that had been with the company 10 years plus. So there is this group that's really grounded in the same principles that Suzanne herself had, and I think that makes us very unique. I mentioned the two presidents. They're both women. It's a woman-led company, and I think that probably offers a bit of a different perspective as well in certain ways.
Speaker 2:This ultimately, I think, leads to an agency, a group of people that are entirely committed to what they do, and one of the things that I felt as a client and I feel very strongly in my role is that we care about our clients' business as much as they do, and that's something that I really felt when I started working with LumiBedar as a client. I said this to my boss at the time. I said they really really care for our success. This is something special, and I think that is something that permeates through, and if we have any clients listening that feel that's wrong, please give me a call, let me know.
Speaker 2:We will correct that as quickly as possible, because that certainly is something that we strive to do. We really do care and want to see you succeed.
Speaker 1:Back in the day when you were working with Ludmille Bidart, before you worked there, what impact did your agency carrying that much about your brand and business Like? How did that impact you as the client back then and as a brand manager? How did that manifest itself? Can you give an example of either then or now, like things that you can point to where you're like okay, that's only the kind of thing that an agency does that really cares.
Speaker 2:I think it's the way that people talk to you and for me it's really big. I really need people to be super authentic with me. If I sense any level of inauthenticity, I kind of shut down. And what I found with whether it was the account director who I was dealing with or others from the agency, I got the same feeling of authenticity and that they really cared and that they were going to go the extra mile for me and I, as a client, was never a transactional client either Um, and and I think that's important I liked involving, uh, the agency on my brand teams, or the I shouldn't say my brand team, the brand team that I was helping manage, and you could see when they attended if you know, because I have worked with a number of agencies if they thought this was a nuisance to be there versus a privilege to be there, and how they, how they interacted and participated in those meetings, and I think that I saw a lot of very comfortable early participation, appropriate challenge, appropriate challenge.
Speaker 2:And I can think of a couple examples that the Lumiba DAW team challenged some of our strategies, and in a very appropriate way, and it ended up leading to a monumental shift in strategy that probably created one of the biggest increases in sales that the brand I was working on ever saw post-launch.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And this was a drug that had been on the market for over 15 years. We saw growth, like in the first year.
Speaker 1:That's astounding.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I imagine, when you sort of talk about that kind of like appropriate level of challenging, it is both a respectful way of delivering a different point of view, but also a point of view that comes from research and being deeply grounded right Like that's. That's, I imagine the other way the agency shows up is to have done the work.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and, and a lot of it is based on trust too. You, you can challenge people you trust and who trust you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and in that situation we were definitely at that level of yeah, bring it on, because we need some help here. And you brought it and it was darn good.
Speaker 1:So thank goodness for that. Yeah, that's awesome. So partway through this journey your role changes to be VP healthcare business strategy. Is that kind of a shift in title only, or was there a shift in fundamentally what you did at the agency when that change occurred?
Speaker 2:A little bit of both, I would say. You know, when I joined the agency eight years ago, I think we were about 45 people and, as I mentioned, we're over 100 now. So with that we've hired some exceptional talent. And with that hiring of talent, so we hired a person who's a medical director in my group right now, where I used to do a lot more of the management of the medical writing team, which is definitely not my skill. You don't want me writing a lot of copy, that's for sure. I know what good copy looks like, I just can't write it. He is totally in charge of that.
Speaker 2:So it freed me up from having to do the more managerial stuff and really focus in on what I love to do the more client interaction, digging into situational analysis, brand planning, figuring out how to strategically help companies get to where they want to go and, of course, working with our team, figuring out the tactics to support that and how to actually execute on these things. I think that's such an important part of it and there can never really be much separation between strategy and execution. It reminds me of years ago. I remember when I had joined, one of the companies asked me to talk to the entire marketing group about my marketing experience similar to this, and one of the things I did say to them is I've created some of the greatest marketing sales pieces never used. You know they were. They were great in my head. They were great tools that I personally would have liked to have used as a sales rep. But it's not about me.
Speaker 2:It's about how the sales team is going to execute, so we always have to think through what is execution going to look like? Who's going to be doing it? How frequently does that piece have enough legs to be used multiple times? Do you use all of it at once? So thinking through that part is vitally important. So that's where I get to spend more of my time now, and I'm as passionate, if not more passionate, now than I was even 20 years ago but people only have one kind of set of work experiences, and to be, you know, decades in and as, or more motivated than ever is a pretty.
Speaker 1:It's a pretty of post-pandemic beginnings of AI than it did a few years back. Like where, where, where do you see things going right in this moment in time?
Speaker 2:You know it's. It's a question I anticipated you might ask. And and so are things different than they used to be? You know, it reminds me of the first year I started working. One of my colleagues at the time I think it was around February of the year he said you know, it's really busy right now, but things should start slowing down summer. And you know, 25 years later I'm still waiting for that summer, for things to slow down. It. Just it hasn't happened. So I think change obviously is inevitable. Things are constantly changing. What people are worried about today, obviously, you know, there's consolidation in the industry. It's something that just happens, where companies buy other companies and then they get integrated into those. That always is interesting, integrated into those. That always is interesting.
Speaker 2:The healthcare system itself kind of creates some challenges, in that hospitals are full, there's not enough family docs, there's the long wait for specialists, there's reimbursement challenges more than ever. So, you know, are they greater than they were? I mean, I know 10 years ago we were talking about them then as well. I assume that they're greater now than they used to be, but they're similar at the same time. So a lot of the challenges are remarkably the same as they were in the past.
Speaker 2:I guess what we have now is potentially a few more rules that create challenges.
Speaker 2:We have a few more tools like artificial intelligence and how to integrate that into our daily life that are supposed to make things a little bit easier, but there is no playbook on exactly how to do that. So I think the biggest challenge is the fact that there's no script and to some degree you have to learn it yourself and make mistakes hopefully small mistakes that you learn from and you can adjust. And I think we've talked about it at conferences in the past that our industry is not one that lends itself very readily to allowing for mistakes and people are, you know, very willing to point them out. Unless you've got great leadership that will allow you to fail forward fast, that can be a bit of a challenge. So I think I wish we were all allowed to make a few more mistakes and try things and have a little bit of leeway to do that. For me, those are sort of the biggest challenges I see I'm going to kind of press on that one for a sec.
Speaker 1:So obviously you know we can't make mistakes in this industry in the sense that you know we have the wrong claim on a piece or you know we talk about an indication that that doesn't exist. But where would you see an example of sort of safe mistakes, right when it's that fail fast, test and learn, Like are there areas where you would like to see maybe just a different tolerance threshold for let's try this out, because if it doesn't work it's not going to be terrible and actually we're going to get interesting data either way. Like where would you like to see a little bit more tolerance for failing?
Speaker 2:I think obviously, obviously. There's only so many channels that we have to talk to clinicians in this country A lot of the drugs that come out you know, are being used by specialists but also being you prescribed heavily by GPs.
Speaker 2:So I can think of a few examples that I've worked on in the past, that I'm working on, as well as others off the top of my head, where you have a salesforce structured for calling on specialists but not on gps. But there's that opportunity out there with gps that just keeps barking at you, that you just have to try to get out there and and do something. There still is, um, some reluctance to trying maybe some alternate channels to get to them or even different ways to communicate with GPs that are not that traditional. I mean, there's only so many mailers you can send them and web banners that they don't know what means, because you can't say very much in the web banner yeah, yeah so I I see some venturing into testing things, but will be very quick to shut it down if it doesn't show a return after a few months.
Speaker 2:yeah, um, and is there an opportunity to run a little bit longer with that? So that goes against my sort of fast, but sometimes you need to let something, you, something, run its course before pulling the plug on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's just a real challenge. And of course, we have a wonderful country that is absolutely massive, with 45,000 to 50,000 GP spread across it. It's really hard to scale a Salesforce for that nowadays very difficult, especially if there are it's a company with maybe one brand or two brands, uh, where GPs are using it. It's a little bit different if you're one of these multinationals where the GPs are selling you know up to 10 brands, you can justify that expense of having a face-to-face call. But some of these other ones it's, uh, it's. It is a massive challenge and I wish we as an industry could find a way to help them out as well as them have the power to maybe take a few more risks and really fully test things out.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean it's interesting. You know, you mentioned things being in market maybe a little bit longer Fast. I mean fast is all a matter of perspective, right? I think sometimes there's maybe a bit of a cycle where, if there isn't kind of like muscle memory around testing and learning, you don't always have financial or ROI models to compare new things to, and so therefore it's even hard to evaluate something that's being tested because you just don't really have benchmarks and so all the tests kind of tend to fail because there's no good kind of yardsticks a little bit. And I've had that scenario where you put something new and different in market and you can have four people around the table, look at the same data in four completely different ways, two of them saying it's great and two of them saying it's not great at all. So it's just. Do you find that part of the challenge is just evaluation models or what are your thoughts there? Cause I know you, I know you're like a data guy, like you love you, like you like to get into the data.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do love the data. I live there a little too much some days. I think if we were to look at, say, somebody wants to test something at a national level and it's, you know, just adding on one new piece or one new approach at a national level, really, really hard to measure if that's going to have any success across the country. So I think one of the ways to get around that is to do some more local testing where you know you have some an isolated community or something, and I'll say St John's Newfoundland, for the heck, for whatever reason. I grew up there, love the place.
Speaker 2:But if you could do a test in St John's Newfoundland, one in London and maybe one in Winnipeg where you introduce an intervention that you want to test to see if it lifts the business in any way, and just run it there for three months, you could learn so much. We don't tend to have the patience in this industry to do something like that. We just say, well, if it's ready, let's just, let's launch it now and see what happens, and it might be hugely successful, but it might just get lost in the wash in that sales were already increasing and you don't know how much it contributed, whereas if you do it at a smaller scale and more isolated communities, you could learn a lot more. So that's something I've been toying with a little bit recently.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So what's on your mind? You have a really unique perspective. You're in a very senior role at a well-respected national independent agency. Lots of different clients. What's on your mind as you think about the phase that we're just about to get into? The next year, the next couple of years and I'm just gonna leave that open Could be, could be just be regulatory, it could be industry, it could be technology Like what are you thinking about? What are your clients asking about? What's top of mind for you?
Speaker 2:Top of mind for me today was actually looking at, you know, the executive order Trump signed yesterday actually around drug pricing in the United States and you know reductions of 50 to 90% on drug prices, and, and, and his goal is that, um, the U? S would have most favorite pricing in the world. Um, that would turn our industry on its head if it ultimately comes to fruition. Um, so I'm I'm hopeful it won't. It would really shock the system and it would change things because obviously the majority of the sales and the profits in our industry come from the United States and a lot of the investment goes into the United States as well, and that would, I think, cause issues greater than he thinks. You can save a little bit of money here, but it's going to hurt drug development down the road. We can look a few years back when the PNPRB here in Canada was going to remove the United States from the basket of countries that Canada's drug pricing is compared to, and it wreaked some havoc on our system as well. So that is the ultimate thing. That was just top of my mind, but it wasn't two days ago, so that's sort of fresh off the press to see. How is this going to ultimately impact us? But other than that, again I think that our industry is going to chug along similar to the way it has in the past.
Speaker 2:It may sound a bit like a boring answer, but I'm a big fan of making haste slowly, so no sudden movements, really analyzing the situation and not letting things run past us and let them breeze past us and be left behind. But, I think, thoughtfully looking at where the industry is going and making adjustments. And the biggest example in every conference we go to it's talking about AI, and you know probably was about a year ago you had your conference in Toronto, which was great, and we talked a little bit about the fact that you know AI has got a great future. It's going to be great. It gets better every single day, I think. At one of the talks I said you know it's about 80% correct, and is that good enough?
Speaker 1:I still think it's about 80%. I was going to say what do you feel that number is now?
Speaker 2:I think where I've seen it improve is on the way it presents information, and its writing seems to be better now is on the way it presents information and its writing seems to be better now. But where it really hasn't improved is on the facts that it's speaking to.
Speaker 1:Well, and actually some reporting in the last little while, is that some of the recent models are actually getting worse on the facts.
Speaker 2:I'm not surprised. I test it every now and then just to see if it has improved. I'm not seeing anything that I would feel comfortable using en masse, and so I think, in that example, I really would have hated if we had made a decision as an industry like, let's adopt this like crazy and roll it out, because I think it would have done more damage than good. So in one respect, I think as a group, as a pharma group, as an agency group, us collectively, we are approaching it in a fairly mature way, in a reasonable way, and just staying up to date with it. Of course, at your next conference in June, we're going to learn a little bit more from how people have started to adopt it, and meaningful and in good ways, within their environment.
Speaker 2:So, um, still story remains to be told, but you know, we just keep chugging along, but I'm not sure if there's any one thing that I see that's dramatically going to change things. Uh, to the, to the point of scaring everybody. Um, it's just business as usual and trying to find those slivers of differences between the products and, of course, our clients. All of them are challenged with reimbursement across this country. I mean, there's only so many dollars that can go around and our governments have to be prudent on how they spend them. And thankfully our country has got a health technology assessment approach and they do a very mature way of analyzing drugs to make recommendations. But that creates challenges that we all have to help our clients meet head on.
Speaker 1:Well, I think there's a lot of people who are listening who very much appreciate the calm approach. There's a contingent that definitely has got a bit of a sky is falling kind of mentality and I'm not in a position to say what's right, but I can definitely say that this is a human business as much as it's science. It's science about humans and it's, you know, it is a human on the marketing side, you know selling and communicating and connecting with physicians and patients, and I think that make hay slowly is a calming approach in a time when there's lots of noise, right, and that's what experience brings. You've got the perspective to say I've been doing this for a while. I'm still waiting for that summer to come.
Speaker 2:Eventually it'll get here, I'm confident.
Speaker 1:Well, we're getting close, here in Toronto at least. David, I really, really appreciate your time and insights and taking us through some of those stories and bringing us up to speed and looking forward. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:And thank you too. This has been a lot of fun, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks again for listening and your special treat for making it all the way to the end. I'm going to pitch you on our upcoming AI conference. Yes, you heard David mention it on the show. Now you can experience it for yourself. June 17th, toronto Age of AI amazing speakers, tons of insights, inspiration galore and you get to go to the OPMA Summer Social for free. Check out pharma brandsca for more. Thank you.