AstraZeneca has launched not one but two new projects meant to shed some light behind the curtain of the pharma, its people and the industry as a whole.
The first initiative, “Personified,” premiered late last year and brings a more personal layer to AstraZeneca’s U.S. leadership team. The short profiles talk about the motivations and passions of the subjects as well as giving some insight into their personal lives.
Just launched is “That’s Understandable,” AZ’s new podcast hosted by AZ’s U.S. head of external communications, Brendan McEvoy. This is McEvoy’s first foray into podcast host, and the goal is to take complex industry topics but break them down into more digestible and interesting pieces. Each monthly episode will feature McEvoy and a member of the AZ team speaking with an outside expert.
“As the host of this, I am asking the questions to help me understand and thereby help the audience understand,” McEvoy said of the podcast in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing. “It is the desire to be entertaining and engaging enough that it is something that you want to listen to when you're out doing your walk or on your on your car ride.
"We're trying in particular, make sure we choose the right topics and couple the right internal AstraZeneca leaders with an external perspective as well to sort of round out the conversation and make it make it essentially understandable which is, which is how we came up with the the podcast name, ‘That's understandable.’”
Both “Personified” and “That’s Understandable” can be found on AZ’s homepage, with the podcasts also available on Apple Podcast and Spotify. AZ is promoting the projects across its social channels, primarily Facebook and LinkedIn. McEvoy said that because AZ is such a large organization, word of mouth factors in as a good promotional tool as well.
The topics the podcast covers are more broad than just delving into AZ’s therapeutic areas or medicines, but are more about discussing wider issues within the healthcare space with episodes on sustainability, health equity, ChatGPT and AI.
“We're getting unsolicited feedback from listeners, both internally within AstraZeneca, as well as those that are seeing it through our promotion on our social channels or finding it on Apple podcasts or Spotify,” he said.“They're actually emailing us with topics that they want to hear about, which is which is great, because we want to make this relevant.
"We have a pretty good pulse on on the hot topics within the industry, but it's also great to see what do people want to hear about, what are the topics that they're not understanding or they're hearing about that they'd love a little bit more insight on.”