AI is a theme on the mind of every pharma marketer these days as the evolving technology continues to hold an increasingly important role in the field. At Genentech, marketing teams are clear on one thing: AI won’t be replacing the human touch anytime soon.
That’s according to Genentech’s chief marketing officer Zoë Lazarre, Ph.D., who likens the technology to an “armor, or a digital backpack” that allows her teams to “operate faster, with better insights,” she explained in an interview at Fierce Pharma Week in Philadelphia.
“We think very mindfully what we do use AI for,” she said.
That means that Genentech is “crystal clear” on the technology’s limitations and makes sure not to use it for decisions involving culture, judgement and taste, she emphasized, allowing for marketer’s own judgement and taste to remain at the “very core.”
With the rise in accessible AI tools for patients and the general population, the barrier of the ‘digital divide’ has taken on a new meaning. Once used to describe people who can’t access digital tools widely integrated into society such as the internet, the next frontier of the digital divide separates those who can’t or don’t use major large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini.
It’s a concept Genentech and Lazarre are “very aware of,” she said.
“I think it's really, really important to recognize that if we create this digital divide, we'll create even more health disparity in the United States,” the CMO pointed out.
On the flip side, AI and its speedy insights can be used to put custom content in front of patients even faster. Although the original creative idea still comes from a human marketer, AI can help to customize and reach specific patients, Lazarre noted. Innovation in itself comes from the human at the core of the idea, but in a competitive and crowded landscape, “great creative content” needs to instead be “great innovative creative content,” she explained.
Part of this comes from the knowledge that AI-powered search tools are re-shaping information-seeking patterns and could make an impact on the important matter of trust in where that information is coming from. To Lazarre, trust requires a pharma to be reliable, consistent and, importantly, “providing the right information at the right time.”
“If you're getting spammed with tons of things about DME [diabetic macular edema] and you don't have diabetes or you're going through another type of treatment like cancer, it’s not providing the right information. It's not providing trusted information that helps you solve a problem,” Lazarre said. “Our goal is to build trust really through making sure we understand what the barrier the patient is solving and then customizing the information to them in that time.”
Understanding specific patient barriers, whether it be financial, education or awareness-related, is key to closing the “last mile gap,” a concept Lazarre, who has an academic background in public health, pays close mind to.
“The way I framed our role at Genentech in marketing is that we are accountable for closing that last mile gap,” Lazarre said.
The CMO refers to the large gap between a product making it across the FDA finish line and into a patient’s hands, which could be due to a number of different, individualized factors.
“It could be fear and stigma. It could be access and cost. It could be side effects,” she explained. “There’s a huge gap between that last mile.”
AI and personalization circles back to this mindset, as it can offer clearer insights on where that barrier exists for specific patients. These days, Genentech is moving toward a different era of data segmentation called dynamic segmentation, which considers lived experience that changes throughout disease evolution, requiring “dynamic solutions that can evolve along with you,” Lazarre said.
“How do you show up repeatedly, but capture all the different moments that a patient might might need, or how do you capture all the different moments along that patient's journey that support them?”
Experimental marketing mindset
Lazarre has been with Genentech for 16 years, collecting experience across many different marketing and commercialization business areas until settling into the CMO seat last September. Since stepping in to the position, she’s witnessed the role of a CMO change “dramatically,” she said.
For one, CMOs of today have to be “much more integrated in the data and AI and analytics.” Beyond being a whiz in the company’s data management system, Lazarre says that CMOs have to be “really, really visionary,” to better help the organization adjust to a rapidly changing environment.
“I’m like this massive change agent,” she said, with the top priorities of “how do you mobilize through rapid change, and then how do you really understand the data?”
Under her lead, the company’s marketing department has embraced a culture of risk-taking in certain areas, prioritizing creative risks or in channel mix, she said.
“It does not matter to me if you experiment and try something new in marketing and it doesn’t work,” Lazarre explained. “The reward is if you actually make a change when it doesn’t work.”
To drive this point further, Genentech launched its first marketing incentives program this year, offering financial and non-financial incentives to marketers that drive growth. Experimentation is a “big component” to the framework, she noted.
The idea to incentivize top-notch marketing in this way was born out of Lazarre’s own time in the field, where a big factor was considering “what really motivates people to change their behavior,” she said. Those metrics can be harder to track than determining growth within other business aspects at the company, but even so, Lazarre maintains that marketing “is the growth driver of our organization right now,” she said.
Genentech, the U.S. arm of Swiss juggernaut Roche, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The company’s marketing sector benefits from external, experimental perspectives from different industries such as the online gaming realm, as Lazarre pointed out, referencing performance marketing engagement lead Tiffany William, a recently profiled “Rising Star” in pharma marketing.