2014 Winter Symposium

This session will begin with a brief overview of the digital media ecosystem, and a discussion of data created within the ecosystem, including which data is available from which systems, and considerations on handling and using the data. Attendees will learn how to use the various data options to improve marketing, with emphasis on framework insights, targeting, and measurement.

The session will conclude with a close look at Digital Attribution, including the framework for comprehensive integrated measurement, functional component needs and best practices, analytical methods used, and special considerations for life sciences and pharma.

Upon completion of this workshop, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• Which data pieces are more relevant in today’s world?
• Which analytic methodologies can we use to measure sales impact, not just track engagements?
• Which channels are relevant, synergistic and how do we measure the channel’s ability to increase sales for customers?

Current technology allows firms to produce a granular record of every touch point a consumer makes in their purchase journey online and/or offline before they convert at a firm’s website. However, firms still depend on aggregate measures to guide their marketing investments in multiple online marketing channels, such as display, paid search, referral, e-mail, and affiliates, which upon click-through become conduits or “channels” to firms’ websites. For example, the widely used “last-click” attribution metric assigns purchase credit to the last touched channel and entirely ignores all the other channels a customer might have touched prior to the purchase. Such aggregate and incomplete measurements bias the investment decisions for subsequent marketing campaigns.

This presentation will provide an overview of emerging methodologies to attribute the incremental value of each individual marketing channel in an online environment using individual-level data of customers’ touches in their purchase funnel. We present results from a case study which shows there are significant carryover and spillover effects – for example, e-mails and display ads trigger visits through search and referral channels, while e-mails lead to significant purchases through search channels. Attributing the conversion credit to different channels based on the estimated carryover and spillover effects, we find that the relative contributions of these channels are significantly different from the contributions based on other metrics currently used in practice. The presentation will provide insights into how such methodologies can be used in other settings including pharmaceuticals.

This presentation will provide an overview of the marketing and media mix allocation problem. Starting with a discussion on the current practices used in different industries such as retail, hospitality and other settings, it will highlight the positives and negatives of the current methodologies. Based on the development of state-of-the-art attribution methods, the presentation will provide emerging techniques to tackle marketing and media mix problems based on regression models. The discussion will also focus on the challenges in implementing such models in the pharmaceutical industry and how state-of-the-art methods can help.

Much like any competitive business landscape, the pharmaceutical landscape is also constantly changing. Morphing business realities mean that entities need to adapt to the changing marketplace, which brings with it increasing pressure on more efficient usage of promotional resources. Brand teams are increasingly challenged to allocate resources across multiple promotional channels in a way that enables superior brand performance as well as maximizes return on promotional investment. This in turn informs and improves the semi-annual / annual brand planning process undertaken at various pharmaceutical companies. Organizations embarking on this process of efficient promotional resource allocation do face a number of challenges which need to be mitigated before achieving the desired results. Challenges that are most commonly encountered are:

• Gaps in the promotional data (program participation data, cost data)
• Lack of promotion data
• Nature of the promotion (continuous promotion vs one off promotion)

First, appropriate measurement methodologies are employed to ascertain the effectiveness of promotions keeping in mind these underlying challenges. Primary market research is also conducted with one or more stakeholder groups, as deemed necessary; and finally, industry benchmarks fill the gaps where the first two approaches cannot be accommodated. The resulting promotional effectiveness results from the triangulation are then converted into corresponding response curves forming the building blocks for the resource trade-off analysis. Various simulator and tracking tools are also employed to provide the brand teams with various scenario analyses, which helps in refining the inputs into the brand planning process.