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Beware of the "I"
I was extremely lucky to work on the Cialis brand team. I worked with a lot of extremely talented people like Paula, Paul, & Matt. Together we made a formidable team but I alone did not launch Cialis, I was only responsible for the online marketing of Cialis. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people talk about how “they launched” Lipitor, Zoloft or other products. Yes, they may have been part of the team but to take the credit for what that team did tells me that this person has no basis in which to judge reality.
The other aspect of this taking credit is that success on one brand does not necessarily mean that you will have the same success on another product. There is no “cookie cutter” formula, or process , for making a drug a success in todays complicated market with so many environmental factors in motion working against you. Too many organizations feel that they can establish a process or six sigma process for launching a product and that anyone can step in and follow the process for success. This is simply not true.
At Lilly the Cialis launch team had a lot of dynamics that were unique to the company. First, Cialis was a joint venture and as such all marketing plans and legal/ regulatory approvals had to go through both Lilly and Icos people. The brand leader for Cialis was a gentlemen named Matt and he wanted the best of the best on the launch team as we were, for the first time, going to spend a hell of a lot of money to launch Cialis. He did a great job of keeping our team involved & getting buy in from management at Lilly as well as Icos, in addition to sharing insights with our weekly lunch bunch get together.
On the DTC side we had a great experienced DTC Manager named Paula who brought a true consumer focus to the brand. She recruited and brought in, as a partner ,Grey Advertising and by the time we launched the people at Grey knew as much about the brand as we did. Paul, a marketing associate on the brand team, came up with the Cialis Promise program. This offered a free sample of Cialis and if the patient didn’t like we would buy them a competitors drug at no charge. It was, to say the least, a huge success.
On my side of the cube city I was responsible for developing and implementing the interactive strategy for Cialis, including search and advertising recommendations. We interviewed 6 interactive agencies before selecting Ogilvy One in New York for the development of the Web site and Greater Than One for all our search and online media placement. Heartbeat Digital developed the online ads and with all these agencies involved in the brand we often scheduled agency integration meetings to share insights and programs that we were working on. Under Paula’s watch it all came together nicely and that is why she is now a Director at Lilly.
The Cialis 3-Point challenge game ran in
conjunction with March madness
on sprots sites. As people engage with the game they
were exposed to key
brand messages.
Now I am not going
to shortchange myself here. I was able to do
implement a lot of what I wanted to do but that was
because I had the ability to understand the online
channel and how our target audience used the Web.
This was instrumental in my successes. I knew, for
example, that a lot of men surf the Internet at work
and since a lot of us work in cubes we have little
privacy. I felt therefore that it could be quite
embarrassing for men at work to be caught going to an
ED site. My soultion was to develop RICH media
banners that took the message to our audience where
THEY were online (without them having to come to the
website since our objective during the first months
of launch was to raise brand awareness).
It was a lot of hard work, and a lot of meetings but
because of the synergy on the team we were selected
as DTC team of the year and we received a lot of
kudos. Of course we had internal battles among us but
that is going to happen anywhere you have talented
people working together who are passionate about
their work.
So next time you hear someone say “I launched...”,
remember that they may have had a part in the launch
but there were a lot of hard working people in the
background to also can take a hand for their credit
in the brands success.