In June 2017, the ideal audience members for ads on a particular cancer therapy were on planes flying to Chicago. They were physician passengers on JetBlue headed to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting, but how could the drugmaker reach those doctors in the air as they were making meeting plans?
Enter Ogilvy Health. The agency used proprietary technology to cross-reference data such as the physicians’ specialty, ASCO attendance and travel plans, and even JetBlue seat selection to deliver a message to the TV screen directly in front of relevant doctors encouraging a visit to the the drug brand's booth at the conference. Then, when physicians exited the plane, Ogilvy Health used mobile phone tracking and custom digital billboards to show brand messages to those same doctors as they walked by. The result? A 40% increase in that brand's booth attendance year over year.
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The ASCO work was a breakthrough pilot for Tripl, Ogilvy Health’s now officially launched data consultancy inside the agency. Ogilvy Health and its parent company WPP have been working on the data service solution for eight years, building relationships with more than 500 different data providers to use cross-referenced data to precision-target healthcare providers.
“It’s all about understanding who the person is—from how they prefer to be spoken to, to what they do as a (healthcare provider) and who they are as a person,” Angelo Campano, VP of the point-of-care practice at Ogilvy Health, said in a recent webinar introducing and detailing the specialty service.
The agency is currently working on several more Tripl data integration trials, including one around more timely clinical trial recruitment and another that identifies nontraditional key opinion leaders (KOLs).
The clinical trial recruitment study, for its part, uses social data to reach both patients and the physician they are seeing. With patient permission to contact, Ogilvy Health could send messages about the trial both to the patients based on how they were interacting with a particular social platform and also to each patient’s EHR and the doctor to see during a visit with that patient.
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“The integration is the unique piece here with the electronic health systems at hospitals and how that integration helps with targeting doctors in their daily lives as they go about their business,” Ritesh Patel, Ogilvy VP and chief digital officer, said during the webinar.
The KOL identification also taps data to determine desirable targets for a pharma client. Tripl looks at professional data such as their degree, practice, specialty area and circle of colleagues they keep in routine touch with, but it can also take into account more personal data like family information and reading and TV-viewing preferences. The pilot uncovered traditional nationally influential KOLs but also less obvious local physician influencers.