Anyone with experience in Pharmaceutical advertising knows that it’s harder for these marketers to take advantage of innovative digital solutions because of the countless legal and medical review barriers.
Assemble has worked first-hand with pharma marketers, so we understand how this process can make the thought of running a digital campaign extremely daunting. But ignoring these technologies isn’t an option anymore either.
The good news: there’s a better way. While we’re seeing an increase in campaigns elements generally found in more mainstream tactics—Social Media, Video and On-Line Advertising—we’ve discovered the greatest opportunity for Pharma brands is dynamic creative. Here’s why:
The Challenges Behind Pharma Advertising
“The biggest issue we’ve noticed with our Pharma clients is legal,” Assemble Senior Project Manager, Shanon Gordon, explained. “There are so many rounds of review that each piece has to go through at every stage to make sure it’s pixel perfect—every little comma and period matter.”
So the excitement of a new campaign isn’t quite the same as it is for other brands because of the additional work that follows. “Even when these brands get a good system down, it’s not as easy for them to transition to new technologies because they have to learn how to get them through every stage of legal review.”
How Dynamic Advertising Changes the Game for Pharma
For big Pharma companies, one campaign could involve hundreds of banner ads with all unique messaging and creative. So with such extensive regulations, the solution lies in streamlining the process of serving the right creative to the right audience. Dynamic banner ads do exactly that.
For one recent Pharma client, this new approach has completely changed the way they’ve created, reviewed, and served their banners. “We were able to take the banners we created for them, which included 96 versions each in 7 different sizes—totaling almost 700 different banners—and serve them to people based on their location, gender, and other data researched by their media company. So the messaging, the call to action and the imaging are all changing, allowing us to really tailor their specific messaging to their individual markets all over the country at the exact same time.”
And the best part is changes can be made basically on the fly, giving the brand total flexibility. “We can easily update the copy or images after a few months. Or if there hasn’t been a great rate of return, we can easily update the rotation, change where a version is being shown, or redirect where the link is driving traffic, all through a spreadsheet on the backend without having to build a whole new set.”
Streamlining the Ad Regulation Process
You can just imagine how long it would take to review 700 different ads. So instead, the client chose just one version to show their legal team and use similar resources we use to create the ads to take care of the rest.
“We built them a separate preview link, like a “dummy” version, of just one of the ads, which looks and serves just like a regular HTML banner, and the client had their legal team go through the spreadsheet to verify that all of the copy was approved. This allowed legal to look at all the sizes of that single version, and then approve it based on the copy variations in the spreadsheet versus reviewing every single version.”
And this was just one of the Pharma marketers and agencies that Assemble has helped leverage innovative digital campaigns while staying compliant. This novel technology solution, when executed by awesome agency and marketing teams, allows your Pharma brand to serve the right asset, to the right target, at the exact right time. Contact us to learn more about how dynamic banner ads could enhance your campaigns—and your process!
