Agency 100 Studio Session: AbelsonTaylor | The future of generative AI in pharma marketing

Last year, I’ll give you a cue here. Mmm agency 100 Studio sessions Abelson Taylor. Okay, we’re rolling.

Hi,

this is lushobushak and I’m a senior reporter at M&M. I’m super excited for you to like into this episode of a100 Studio sessions a new podcast series that gives members of the mmm agency 100 list and opportunity to Riff on what sets them apart.

In this

episode. We’re focusing on the agency Abelson Taylor and the future of generative AI in Pharma marketing. I’m happy to be joined by Charlene Jenner vice president director of Engagement strategy at Abelson Taylor.

Hi Charlene. Thanks so much for being

here.

Hey Licious, so great to be here. Thank you.

So let’s dive in to start. I want to help get our audience sort of get an understanding of why they should be delving into generative AI. What is the biggest benefit of generative AI for Pharma marketers?

Oh, absolutely. It was a technology that kind of jumped onto the field around the fall of last year. So when you start to think of different technological shifts that happen in different business and industry verticals,

Usually the healthcare vertical is the slowest to embrace some of these industry changes, but with generative AI it’s kind of agnostic. It jumps across every single industry that we have and we haven’t really seen this kind of shift since the smartphones came onto the scene around 2010-29-2010 around that time frame that it really changed everything.

And as you start to look at where Pharmacy and Pharmacy marketing need to move into this direction, it’s one of those things where we have to start looking at. Where is it become an efficiency for an organization like Abel’s and Taylor as an as an advertising entity. Where is it an efficiency for a pharmaceutical industry? And where is it an efficiency from our patient and our hcp side of it. So there’s a couple of different areas that really jump out at us as this is where generative AI is going to change how we all interact with each other.

What do you see as the biggest hurdle or challenge that generative AI faces as it becomes more of a dominant force in marketing when we start to think of the hurdles. I always like to

couple those with what are the things that are benefits. So there’s things that are good for us and then there’s things that we have to be careful for I’m always so wildly optimistic about new technology. I feel like we should always look at it with this sense of wonderment and idealization, but then

Also have an eye on what the concerns could be or where we need to look, you know, look for some of the things that might be issues for us as we move forward when you start to think about what are the things that can do well for us it can help us automate a very laborious task. It can also help us personalize content. It can also help us create a new product or short a time frame for development. You can also help us with prediction, but conversely when we start to think about what are the hurdles we look at those same things that are great for us and have to figure out what become those problems like when we start to think about automating tasks and having it personalized content for us one of the things that generative AI

Also does incorrectly is it has an inconsistency in terms of the data sources that it uses. It doesn’t prioritize the data. So when you’re asking it to create content, it looks at all the data that it has equally whereas if you’re thinking of a human with authentic intelligence, they’re looking at the prioritization of the data or the prioritization of the sources of the data, whereas generative AI doesn’t necessarily do that. So there’s going to be some inconsistency that happens when you’re trying to create content when you’re trying to automate a task which you know who doesn’t want to make things simpler and sometimes building a spreadsheet is so laborious and crazy wouldn’t it be great if something could do it for us, which is great generative AI can do that as well. However, it also from a you know, hurdle perspective. It doesn’t give us the idea of

How does a human want to receive the information and kind of absorb it so again, it creates spreadsheets and data and automating tasks in a way that is a little bit more generic. So it always does take that human authentic intelligence to come over top of it and create those ideas. Now two of the biggest areas that we have to really be concerned about is fraud and misinformation and privacy and discrimination bias. When we start to think about personalizing content and creating new products and services generative AI can give you a thousand ideas and five seconds. It’s amazing.

But when you think about work pulls the information from just like I said a few minutes ago it indiscriminately pulls from sources. So if there’s fake content or information that isn’t completely vetted. It doesn’t know the difference between that and maybe a realized source.

And even when you think about the data that it pulls out of it, where is it scraping that data from so in healthcare in Pharmacy specifically, we have a lot of privacy concerns. There’s a lot of information around, you know, where we can use the information and grab the information but there’s not a lot of information right now around should we use it, you know, just because you can have access to the data. Should we be using it in these ways. So we’re going to start to see a couple of concerns that come up legislatively around privacy controls.

And then when we start to think of discrimination bias.

Generative AI models can be used to make decisions and they can create personalized cohort groups and they can help you find targeted segments.

But just like I said before as it starts to pull all the data together, if the data exists in different formats, the discrimination and bias that exists in these formats gets carried through into gender into generative AIS ideas so it can create information and give you ideas but you have to always vet it. So that’s one of the things as we start to look at the biggest hurdle.

Look at what are the pluses and then figure out where you need to figure out where your company and organization needs to be a little bit more careful

and currently what areas of marketing are being affected by this new technology and then, you know moving forward into the future as this technology expands and grows. Where do you see it moving into further?

Ah, let me tell you generative AI has an amazing. Hold on the marketing area when you think about it. There’s there’s been about probably 2500 new AI tools that have been introduced since January of this year and when you start to look at all those types of tools.

It covers the gamut runs the gamut of all the different things that you can do as a marketing person. It can help you with brainstorming and idea it can help you with deciding what campaigns you want to run segmenting your data. There’s also the tools that help you create imagery or sound bites or video clips so it can cover and do automatically everything that you you all the tasks that you think I’m marketing person could do.

The biggest difference is that with the way that marketing works. It’s all in how you bring the data and ask the question and there’s a couple of funny jokes that go around the internet right now where it’s like, oh, you know the AI is going to replace us. What are we going to do? It’s gonna be crazy. I kind of consider that a little bit it’s a little bit humorous to me because this would entail that everybody knows exactly what they want at that exact moment an AI can build that exactly perfect and I don’t know any client and agency relations are where the client knows exactly what they would like to to the exact tea and can build it. So when you start think about marketing it is AI is a great tool for us to generate more ideas and then vet the idea is that come up it’s a great tool for us to look at creating new pieces of content and creating some imagery to go along with that but there’s always going to be a human

Aspect around that to create. What is the story? What is the feeling? What’s that human connection around it? Because AI can’t do all of those things. Now when we move into the future, there will probably be a whole new roles within marketing and creative teams that start to become more prevalent as we start to move into year three to five of generative AI what I mean by that is when we you know, we talked a little bit about of the client would need to know exactly what what they’re asking for. This is where there may be a new role within a marketing agency or a creative agency to say. Hey are there, you know content editors who are also great at crafting prompts for AI systems. Are there content editors who are great at understanding how to use AI to get the right amount of information. So what we’re going to start to see is new roles that start to enter into

Regular marketing advertising and creative organizations that are specific to AI usage. So there’s going to be the folks who you know use it on a day-to-day basis to help them brainstorm. Then there’s also going to be those those new jobs that get created that are specifically get around utilizing AI people who are great at being able to write those prompts or those questions to be able to get the right input in to the system to get the right picture out or the right piece of content or the right segmentation that’s going to become a science within itself.

Now you mentioned that there’s been over 2,000 tools introduced since January. I mean that’s a pretty fast pace or speed of these things being developed. What are your thoughts on that speed and

can the pace continue? Well, the speed is crazy. When you think about it generative AIS kind of like the wild west back in the day. There were no laws. There was Westford expansion everyone. You could just build a store you could build a town. That’s where AI generative AI is right now because there is very little legislation. There’s very little regulation surrounding it right now and while there’s been a lot of tools and platforms that have entered into our Marketplace today. There’s also a lot of Regulation that needs to come and and police those a little bit when you think about it generative AI the biggest one of course being open AI is chat GPT, and of course Google’s Bard they were trained on

And that was found on the internet. So you got to figure they’ve read all of Wikipedia are they’ve looked at all these articles or they’ve looked at this entire library of imagery and it was able to start to create a contextual relationship with that data so that when you ask it a question it can respond correctly.

What no one really talks about is how we’re all these content creators artists writers you all these folks. How are they being compensated for having to try having trained these open AIS inadvertently?

So when you think about it, there is going to be a little bit of a reckoning on well, where did this information come from or what information should be scraped by generative AI should people be compensated for the work that they’ve done if they’ve written that article or if they took that photo that generative AI is taking inspiration from so the same way that we today are held by intellectual property rules copyright laws. Those types of regulations are going to start to get levered leveraged on to generative AI platforms. So even though we’ve had so many tools getting created there. There’s going to be a little bit of right sizing of the information that they’re using how they’re Gathering it and who’s being compensated for it. We’ve already seen that the EU is putting a little bit of pressure on generative AI in fact Italy band chat GPT for about 28 days and it’s early. It’s early rollout.

Because they they could not they could not understand from openai.

Where the information was being stored or how this information was being gathered and they were concerned about their citizens’ privacy and just like we saw the EU roll out the gdpr which was a lot more rigorous than let’s say California CCPA privacy laws. We will start to see that come through and with those laws some of these tools may not make it because some of these tools maybe in violation of privacy controls or how they gather information or how they store information. So it is interesting to see this wild west and I love it because it’s amazing to be able to see everyone have freedom to create but we will start to see a Slowdown of the number of tools that will be created. We will also start to see some legislation get passed which then will close some of the openness of generative Ai and how it uses information. We will definitely see a lot of privacy laws come into place to protect.

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any final thoughts or takeaways for Farmer marketers in particular about generative AI, you know if there is a couple of things if you think are really important for them to take home, what would they be?

Yeah, I feel like as we start to look at marketing and sales within a generative AI in the pharmacy industry. We cannot ignore this amazing impact that this technology is going to have on the treatment side of Pharmacy as well because we talk about it from a marketing side and we talk about what it can do to make these, you know opportunities faster for us. What’s going to drive this in the future is how generative AI like I talked about in the beginning of our call here is it’s making an impact on all the verticals in every industry and that includes things like drug Discovery. So as we start to look at how generative AI is going to power, you know, analyzing large sets of data and simulating drug interactions and identifying potential drug candidates that might have been overlooked in traditional Doug Discovery methods well,

Is going to do it’s going to lead to the development of some new treatments for diseases. It’s going to lead to the creation of some disruptors in our industry as well. This is going to force change and speeding up of the processes and all aspects of the chain. So we start to think of a couple of the areas where this is definitely going to affect the farm and marketing perspective is if drug Discovery speeds up.

Speed to Market also changes. We’re going to have to start to hit those roads faster. So if it normally would take between five or ten years four a drug to make it to Market that time frame may actually get shorter. And if that time frame gets shorter than marketing has to be shorter. We have to be able to meet them when they’re ready. So we always need to start to look at how are we running in parallel with development teams? How are we keeping up with the changes in the industry? And are we making those fast adjustments to all the types of Engagement plans Omni Channel programming Channel programming all of those types of things.

Because ultimately and my favorite thing about AI is it gives us time it gives us time to discover new drugs quicker. It gives us time to build a strategy faster. It gives that time to humans that we probably haven’t had from a technology perspective for for a long time technology always increases efficiency for humans, but in in the generative AI world when you can increase time in Pharma that’s time for an hcp to spend with their patients that’s time for a patient to have one more treatment that’s time for a marketing person to say let me look at one more segmentation to hit one more group more closely.

And that’s something that you can’t really buy. So when you think of AI and what it means ultimately the magic of it for pharmacy is that it gives us time and every part of our work and that’s that’s a miracle when you think about it because one more day

is amazing when you’re talking to an hcp or a patient one more day to build something to create that tighter connection or to reach that person through a campaign.

I mean who wouldn’t give for that?

Well, thank you so much Charlene for offering your expertise on this and we’ll certainly be keeping an eye out on this transformative technology moving forward.

Now this being the agency 100 Studio sessions podcasts. We have one final question that we’ve been asking our guests and that is what is the last song you listen to the last song that I was yeah.

I think for a minute probably my prerogative by Bobby Brown

nice.

I have to I run on my treadmill. So I always have to have something that kind of keeps the pace going

say

it’s an oldie. It’s an oldie, but you know who doesn’t love nineties R&B right?

Good one. Well, thank you again so much Charlie.

Awesome. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.