When asked about the work that defined his agency’s 2022, LiveWorld VP of marketing Matthew Hammer points to an engagement with recently added client Nutricia.
The infant formula brand started its marketing push with a social media campaign designed to generate awareness among healthcare professionals. LiveWorld was brought in to extend that effort to patients — and wound up adding brand creative to its charge. Before long, LiveWorld had been assigned three additional Nutricia brands.
“Nutricia liked our creative work and our ability to help them reach HCPs through social media,” Hammer says. “We have a lot of data to support that kind of approach.”
LiveWorld saw revenue increase by 10% in 2022, to $11.1 million from $10.1 million the previous year. In addition to the Nutricia work, the agency added engagements with Pfizer (including work on both Paxlovid and its COVID-19 vaccine with BioNTech), Idorsia, Mass General Brigham, Novocure, LabCorp and Chiesi. They join Gilead, Daiichi
Sankyo, Zoetis, Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca on the LiveWorld roster.
Staff size increased from 85 people at the beginning of 2022 to 95 people at its end, with HR director Tashona White joining from BirdDog Media in October. Hammer believes White is a particularly good fit, owing to her ability to handle both parts of LiveWorld’s universe: the corporate side and the 150 social media agents tapped by the agency to manage and monitor accounts on behalf of brands.
White also heads up the company’s employee experience initiative, designed to cohere a largely remote workforce.
“We wanted somebody who had the background to continually recruit and train so that we can continue to level up people’s experience across and within their particular skill sets,” Hammer explains. “Tashona has that background and experience in different countries as well as here in the U.S.”
Hammer is very clear about what comes next for LiveWorld. While he acknowledges the same macroeconomic headwinds and recessionary fears of many of his industry peers, he stresses that LiveWorld is in growth mode and will continue in that mode for the immediate future.
His top priority: the ongoing task of replenishing the company’s new-business pipeline. This could present a significant challenge in 2023 and beyond, given ongoing changes in the social media landscape. Twitter is a platform of concern, owing to both uncertainty around the face of advertising on the platform and LiveWorld’s regular use of it on clients’ behalf.
Nonetheless, as LiveWorld pursues its growth agenda, Hammer stresses that the agency will leverage its strengths. In this instance, that means emphasizing the importance of compliance and how organizations in highly regulated areas such as pharma might utilize LiveWorld’s management and reporting platforms.
“We’ve added a few new services and we’re talking about expanding into other healthcare-adjacent areas,” he says. “We’re in pharma and we’re in hospitals, but we’re thinking more seriously about going into the medical device space with a concerted effort.”
. . .
Our marketing role model…
Steve Jobs’ emphasis on creating emotional connections between customers and a brand is still relevant, particularly in the realm of social-media marketing. He frequently spoke about starting with the user experience and working your way back to the technology, but most people don’t know he approached marketing the same way. What is the emotional experience we want the customer to have with the marketing? One that resonates with what will later be the product experience. This still applies today. — Hammer
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From the June 01, 2023 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
