The agency side
Pharma Blog
Strategic partner vs. vendors....
May/15/2007 06:47 Permalink
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If you read the trade magazines you probably have seen more and more stories about agencies walking away from companies and potential lucrative business. There is a transformation taking place in the media marketplace and agencies are aware the the traditional "wine and dine them" relationship is joining the dinosaurs. The future is about being a strategic partner with the brand and being evaluated on quantitative metrics that determine their value in the marketing-brand relationship.



All too often pharma marketers micromanage agencies and turn them into expensive task managers rather than strategic partners. They ignore advice and often make bad decisions based upon research that paints an incomplete picture. Take Cialis for example; on the Cialis.com website you'll see the new headline "With Cialis you can have the option to be ready fast...or have up to 36 hours to take your time". What's wrong with this picture? Well first it plays right into the competitions hands. They can now flood the market with a wealth of material that states that people don't want 36 hours they want to be ready quickly and our product works faster. Then there are consumers who may think..."well if I take it and we have sex why would I want it in my system for 36 hours?". I am sure that the people on the brand team have a ton of research that shows that men want to be ready quickly but this is what happens when you do too much research and don't have a pulse on the market.


Patients and consumers know what half-life is...they may not know the term but believe me they know about medications they put into their bodies. The problem seems to come from DTC marketers who develop messages and then use an MBA roadmap to "test" the message. An agency that is a strategic partner would be looking at ways to truly communicate the benefit of 36 hours in ways that are relevant to the patients not to marketers testing messages.


The pharmaceutical industry has never embraced the agency as a strategic partner principle because after all we have to justify that we know all the answers. I am not sure what happened in the Rozarem case as this seems that the creative person at AT got carried away after dropping some really good drugs. Above all we as marketers have to admit that we don't know all the answers and that patients and consumers cannot be told what to buy anymore. We also have to acknowledge that DTC advertising on TV is just not providing the ROI it once used to. There are some very good creative agencies out there doing some really great work but unless the needle moves the great work will only be acknowledged as marketers pat themselves on the back at award dinners.
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