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Welcome to the cookieless era, pharmaceutical marketers! The digital landscape is changing, and it's time to adapt. With the phasing out of third-party cookies, we are entering a new age of direct-to-consumer advertising. This shift presents both challenges and opportunities for pharmaceutical marketers. Let's explore how to navigate this change successfully.

Understanding the Cookieless Landscape

Why are cookies becoming a thing of the past? Privacy concerns and user consent are driving this change. As third-party cookies crumble, marketers must find new ways to gather insights and engage consumers.

Innovative Data Collection Strategies

How can we collect data without cookies? It's all about first-party data. This means direct interactions with your audience. Think surveys, newsletters, and loyalty programs. These methods provide valuable insights while respecting user privacy.

Creating Personalized Experiences

How do we personalize without cookies? It's time to get creative! Use the data you have to tailor content and offers. Remember, relevance is key to engagement.

Leveraging New Technologies

What technologies can aid this transition? Artificial intelligence and machine learning are game-changers. They can analyze large datasets and predict consumer behavior. This tech makes targeted marketing possible, even without cookies.

Building Strong Customer Relationships

How do we build trust? Transparency and communication are crucial. Be clear about how you use data. Build a brand that consumers can trust.

Adapting to Regulatory Changes

How do we stay compliant? Keep up with changing regulations. This ensures your marketing strategies are both effective and lawful.

The cookieless future is not just a challenge; it's an opportunity. It's a chance to innovate, build trust, and create more meaningful consumer connections. As pharmaceutical marketers, you can lead this change. Embrace it, and you will thrive!

Brace yourselves for another year of rapid evolution across the digital landscape. That’s the takeaway from talks with eight industry leaders, who see advances in artificial intelligence, personalized messaging and channel optimization shaping direct-to-consumer (DTC) communications in 2024.

Predictions about new and intensifying trends are an annual tradition, but the changes in store for 2024 look more significant than usual to experienced leaders who have seen and driven the transformation of healthcare over the past decade. In the Phreesia report, Industry voices: Trends to watch in 2024, Pallavi Garg, Head of Global Oncology Products and Pipeline Strategy at Takeda, says now is perhaps “one of the most exciting times to work in our industry.”

Indeed, Cassandra Sinclair, a senior health and wellness advertising executive and board advisor, foresees the intersection of science and personalized storytelling fundamentally changing how teams engage consumers, patients and caregivers in 2024.

Brands have the tools to deliver messages at every point in the healthcare journey, from screening through treatment. They also have the power to personalize those messages, particularly at the point of care. As Roz Silbershatz Tomás, who leads the Global Libtayo Core Brand Team at Regeneron, explains, the point of care provides more opportunities for personalization and specificity than other channels, making it a key enabler of tailored, one-to-one campaigns.

“Point of care is a critical space to give the patient precise education on their disease state, knowing that they’re sitting in the doctor’s office, potentially about to make a decision on their healthcare and treatment,” she says.

The proliferation of options and embrace of omnichannel is driving companies to look at the role of each channel “with much more scrutiny,” says Alison Tapia, Senior Director, Performance Marketing and Digital Innovation at Dermavant Sciences.

“Brands are asking more questions to understand whether their strategy is working,” Tapia says. “Some of these critical considerations include: Are we reaching the right people? Are we showing up with appropriate messaging for that channel? Is it impactful? And can we compliantly message in that channel?”

Arielle Chavkin, Group Director of Digital Partnerships at Initiative, anticipates that teams will expand their communication toolkits in greater recognition of the needs and priorities of various patient subpopulations. That awareness makes it important to “truly embrace and plan campaigns based on how the same disease can impact different communities,” Chavkin says.

Social media also can help reach specific communities, but success requires an understanding of the nuances of each platform. Juli LeDoux, Director, Marketing–Patient at ImmunoGen, uses TikTok as an example. “Elaborating on disease states relevant to younger audiences or disease states that might not be considered as highly emotional, such as neurology or dermatology, is key for reaching the largest audience” on the popular short-form video app, she says.

Longer-term trends are building beneath the fast, continual shifts in where people meet online and within the communities they are building. Those long-term trends indicate that patients are, in the words of Meredith Odell, Senior Marketing Director at AstraZeneca, “choosing to share more, learn more and to be their own advocate.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) cuts across all of these trends, and teams are assessing its potential to do more for them operationally, from reviewing content to conducting market research. Over the past year, access to AI tools has become more democratized, observes Alexandra Beneville, Vice President of Content Strategy at Phreesia, and with those tools now more widely available to teams, she foresees 2024 as the year of AI adoption and application.

Digital disruption is forcing a reevaluation of how to connect with patients. Responding to a series of major events—from upheaval at Twitter to the phasing out of third-party cookies—brands are adopting nimbler, more data-driven models that empower them to quickly switch tactics as the operating environment changes and they learn which approaches work best.

Amy Patel, Phreesia’s Director of Analytics, discussed this transforming landscape on a Digital Pharma East 2023 panel that weighed the best ways to reach patients in a world that is “increasingly complex, ever-changing and full of more and more obstacles and challenges,” as she described it.

The phasing out of third-party cookies was a major panel focus. Deprived of a resource that has long been a cornerstone of online engagement, teams now are putting more emphasis on collecting first-party data with consent. Lisa Frankina, Director of Digital Marketing for VIVITROL® at Alkermes, explained how her company works to build trust so that patients feel comfortable sharing their data.

“You want to connect with your audience and emotionally connect with patients,” Frankina said. “What we try to do is amplify the patient voice with first-hand testimonials—a video of someone who has actually been in that position—so that the content is relatable in order to make that authentic connection.”

In the previous, cookie-enabled world, brands could put their materials in front of patients no matter where they were on the internet. Lacking that option today, Natalie Wills, Associate Director of Marketing at Blueprint Medicines, is rethinking how Blueprint can ensure that patients see its content. Some of the new questions her team is asking include: “Where are patients looking for information? Are there ways we can reach patients outside of relying on cookies and data? Where we can put articles out there in the world where patients can find us and come to us?” Wills said.

Brands need a range of ways to connect with patients—and be willing to activate, optimize and switch tactics mid-campaign, the panel agreed. Grace Rodriguez, Head of DTC Portfolio Marketing, iPVU at UCB, described how those necessities manifest at her company.

“Having that nimbleness to really ensure that we are optimizing our spend and reaching those patients, while getting all of the data that we can to really tell that story, is pretty much No. 1 for us,” Rodriguez said. “What are those KPIs per channel, per tactic, per partner? If we’re not delivering on that, then you optimize or you move on.”

The capacity to pivot quickly is reshaping the media-planning cycle, too. The panelists explained that they now continually monitor how different aspects of a campaign are performing and adjust their approach as necessary throughout the year.

“We’ve built more flexibility into our media plans this year than in any year I ever have worked in this space,” said Jack Vance, Managing Director of Data and Activation at SOLVE(D), An IPG Health Company. “Every one of these media plans has a bucket of dollars, and we say ‘We’re going to decide where these go later in the year; we’re going to pick whichever platforms are working really well.’ ”

As Vance explained, a wait-and-see spending model requires brands to frame their definition of success at the start of a campaign, measure how its results compare to that agreed-upon definition and take action if performance falls short of expectations.