Agency 100 Studio Session | AbelsonTaylor: Marketing attribution comes of age in pharma

Jack I’ll give you a cue here.

Mmm agency 100 Studio sessions Abelson Taylor. Okay, we’re rolling.

Hi, this is Jack O’Brien digital editor m Eminem. I’m super excited for you to plug into this episode of a 100 Studio sessions a new podcast series, which gets members of the mmm agency of 100 list and opportunity to Riff on what sets them apart.

This episode we’re speaking with Rebecca Visconti VP of marketing intelligence at Abelson Taylor.

Rebecca thanks for joining us today.

You’re welcome. I’m glad to be here. Thank you.

I wanted to start our conversation off around the term marketing attribution and what that means to Brands and marketing agencies in 2023. I’m curious how that maybe even compares to say a couple years ago like 2020 or 2015.

Yeah. Sure marketing attribution is definitely evolved considerably. I’ve been working in Industry since 2007 and it really wasn’t even something that was discussed back then and I would say, you know, maybe in my 2015 Brands were typically doing what you call last click or last touch attribution, which was giving credit for a conversion. Whatever that conversion might be to the last touch point that a consumer whether it’s a patient or provider or your traditional consumer the last touch point they received and so for example is an individual was

Receiving or had interacted with multiple marketing campaigns or touch points along their Journey.

All of the credit for the conversion would be attributed to that last touch point. And again, I think that’s probably where most brands were across most Industries around that time in 2015.

Since then there’s been a lot more advancement that’s taken place and marketing attribution is now the science of really assigning credit to as many or all of those touch points as possible to get a much clearer understanding of what what’s influencing the consumer along their entire Journey. So it’s come a long way and you know, even in the last few years, there’s been I would say more tools to help support that initiative as well as more individuals focused in on marketing attribution as a profession. So you have more data scientists out there that understand this particular area of marketing analysis.

I appreciate you giving us the lay the land there and I guess I was kind of curious what your current assessment is of marketing attribution as it relates to healthcare and farm a Brands and then maybe if I could offer a follow-up question how that differs compared to say General consumer.

Yeah, I’ve worked across in my career. I’ve worked across so many Industries and I would say that Healthcare and Pharma unfortunately are a little behind the curve to be honest on marketing attribution. There’s a few reasons for that. I mean, I think some of it is it’s a much more traditional industry that’s been around for years. It was less digitally focused in marketing attribution. Really I think stemmed quite a bit from the Digital Data capabilities. So now that there’s a new focus on or an enhanced focus on digital marketing within the Pharma and Healthcare space now, I think they’re they’re starting to realize that this is something that’s important that they need to build infrastructure for that. They need to be looking at their reports this way and to better understand what’s working effectively. I think other brands or other Industries out there have just been more focused because they were just more digitally focused.

Previously, so I’m really excited about coming into this industry and really helping Grant Pharma and Health Care like accomplish these things and build this infrastructure.

It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve had a conversation with a leader and they’ve said that Healthcare is behind the curve on something. So it sounds like this is just part of a larger industry Trend kind of pivoting the conversation a little bit. I’m curious from your experience which tools and channels are perhaps under appreciated by farmer Brands due to a lack of sophisticated attribution capabilities in which are maybe over appreciated.

I think that there are a couple of channels from my observations that I would call out here.

Think that it’s harder at times in the Pharma and Healthcare space obviously because of privacy concerns to find the tools or vendors or partners that you can work with that are able to identify the individuals that are receiving display ads. For example, I also think that there’s been some challenges and really developing truly robust email programs. I’ve been a little surprised since I moved into the healthcare space at how email doesn’t really take as strong of a role from a marketing perspective. I think it’s strong on the sales side, of course, but the like the general marketing side of things the email Channel just tends to be a little less of a focus than I’ve seen in the past but again display as well there tends to be

I would say across all Industries. It tends to be a channel that people are a little bit more cautious of but I would say especially so in this industry just because there’s that extra layer of challenge in identifying who’s actually getting targeted and who’s receiving those display Impressions

and I’m curious when you look at what Able’s and Taylor has done speaking about your agency specifically in the past few years as it relates to marketing attribution, you know, what have been some of the successes would have maybe been some of the things where you’re kind of fine-tuning that approach. Yeah,

I think Partnerships with the right vendors has been a key Focus. So for example, we’ve we’ve partnered with pulse point and their hcp365 capabilities to improve our enhance our ability to identify the providers that are clicking through a variety of channels from Paid social to paid search display whatnot. And

It those types of Partnerships and those types of enhancements to the data sets have really helped us take marketing attribution, you know, and in advance it further Beyond where it was when when we started this initiative a few years ago and really when it comes to marketing attribution, that’s the key is finding those those ways in which you can enhance your data set, you know, connect the marketing touch points or the sales touch points or whatever that influential touch point is to the providers or the patients so that you can build out a stronger set of data that allows you to understand what that Journey looked like prior to a conversion without the data. There is no marketing attribution. So we’ve just put a ton of focus into the things that allow us to enhance our data sets and make that story of the the customer Journey provider or patient.

Is more detailed and more in-depth

as with everything in healthcare these days. It seems like it’s just data day to data drives the conversation and that kind of leads into my next question, which is what other ways you’ve been able to use data science to provide actionable insights for your pharmacist because I know they’re all asking for it. And I know the agencies are stepping up to the plate saying here’s what we have to be able to drive success.

Yeah, we don’t

take us.

It all I think marketing attributions important attribution is really that science of assigning credit to which channels influence to conversion. But we also use our data science team to help us use the data sets to analyze other things as well. So for example, we’ll look at which combinations of touch points are the most effective which ones are supporting one another what type of sequence of marketing touch points is working effectively as well. As you know, how many days does it take us to get a an initial conversion versus a subsequent conversion. So there’s a lot of other things that we look at outside of just that that standard marketing attribution data set to help bubble up additional insights and more learning into what’s working how things are working together and really help continue to move that needle.

On top of that. We also do quite a bit of experimentation and data science is a big part of that because not only is data often used to develop the ideas or to inspire the ideas for areas to test but it’s also obviously the the key to measuring experiments to determine which things are working well or winning when you’re running your experiment. So experimentation is a huge part of what we do as well. I actually call that one of on top of marketing attribution. It’s it’s another one of my work hobbies. And so, you know, I think between marketing attribution analyzing those data sets using the data science team to really run robust experimentation across campaigns and channels. I think that that we’re really able to help provide our clients with strong recommendations on what updates tweaks adjustments that they can make to their marketing plans.

I wanted to ask you just in terms of you know, your data analytics capabilities and obviously you don’t have to name off any specific clients due to confidentiality and things of that nature. But is there a time or two that it really stands out where you discovered something that was surprising or unexpected for a client? Is there any sort of story that comes to mind?

Yeah again not naming brands.

their time when

are working with

client internally has a requirement for their sales team to reach out to their providers on a very specific Cadence.

And one of the data sets that we had included in our marketing attribution model where their sales touch points, so we were getting like how often were their sales team sending emails or calling or having face-to-face meetings with the providers and it turned out that by analyzing this data. We actually uncovered that there was a lack of compliance in some areas with that requirement that there were providers who weren’t receiving any sales touch points within a fairly large time period And so that client was able to take that that learning and that data and go to the sales team and have some conversations

with

them on how they could help improve the the pull through on those expectations.

And I think that one was was definitely more of a unique case. I would say I think the more common ones that we see are.

You know, our clients will think a particular channel is doing well because they’re getting reports from that vendors platform, you know, and and it’s not to say the vendors are misrepresenting themselves and the reports. I generally don’t see any cases of that. But what I do see is that when you then take all of the the vendors all the touch points and your analyzing the data in a more holistic manner, sometimes it tells a very different story. So we had a client and we this is very common that learned a channel that they that they were investing fairly heavily and really wasn’t giving them the the return that they thought it was because not only I forgot to mention this not only are we doing marketing attribution, but wherever possible we’re taking the cost of those channels into the analysis so that we can help calculate Roi and it turned out this channel just

Really was costing far more money than they thought it was and so they you know, typically when you see that the client will make decisions about how to readjust their spend and and put budget into the channels that seem to be more effective for them.

I know that we focused a lot of this conversation on the agency and you know the industry at large, but I wanted to Pivot the last question over to you as an individual, you know, you’ve come into the healthcare industry with this long resume of analytics focused roles. I’m curious what led you to make that decision because obviously Healthcare is one of those kind of idiosyncratic Industries that’s got a lot of lifers and can be a little intimidating. So I’m curious what made you you know, hop over to health care and what youth made about you know, where things stand in the industry.

Yeah. I mean I would say is very intentional. There are a couple of reasons for it. You know, I I started out my career focused a little bit more in e-commerce. I moved into more of a industry.

Gnostic role at one point or is working across e-commerce, but also travel and finance and hospitality and you know lots of different Industries and eventually I I found myself in a role that was more focused in healthcare and I ended up stealing and maybe this is this partly comes with age perhaps but I felt more intrinsic value in working in the healthcare space and that had a lot to do with the decision. It’s just working in an industry where I feel like I’m helping people another part of it though to be honest was also you know, I feel like the healthcare industry is more stable than some of the other Industries. I you know, I worked in auto finance for a while. I worked in mortgage for a while and those two industries have, you know can see today they’ve been a little bit more volatile. So for me, it was both the stability of the industry, but then also just that intrins

Value of feeling like I’m doing something good in the industry that I work in.

Yeah, especially in light of the pandemic. I know it made a lot of people kind of focus a lot more on health care and the role that plays in our life. So I don’t think that you’re alone by any stretch and it’s obviously great to have your analytics background informing the healthcare decisions of tomorrow.

I did promise before we started the conversation that there would be a mystery question at the end. So I hope you’re ready for that given that it is the agency 100 Studio sessions podcast. I have to ask what is the last song that you listen to? Oh

my goodness.

It was probably Fleetwood Mac a Fleetwood Mac song on the radio and the car yesterday maybe dreams.

Excellent.

I’m not I don’t actually come from that generation, but my parents were huge Fleetwood Mac fans. So it’s today. So one of my favorite bands

actually I was actually I did one of these recordings yesterday and we had somebody that their answer was Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. It’s good to see that we’re going through the entire catalog there. Obviously a great a great all-time band.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well Rebecca, thank you again for joining us here answering all these questions and giving us the insights on the data analytics capabilities that Abelson Taylor and all the work that the agency is doing on behalf of the industry. Really appreciate your time.

Of course. Thank you so much. We have a wonderful day

you as well.