Last week, we teamed up with our friends at Digilant for their virtual Fireside Chat series. Digilant is a premier omnichannel media partner on a mission to help agencies and brands connect their digital advertising spend to revenue. That’s why they tapped us, the first and only omnichannel platform for healthcare marketing and analytics, to co-host their latest webinar on all things healthcare and pharma advertising.
For those who missed this session, our CEO Greg Field dove into using data to supercharge campaigns, omnichannel tactics, preparing for a cookieless future, the future of healthcare marketing, and more. Watch the webinar recording and check out our executive summary on everything you need to know to power successful healthcare and pharma campaigns in 2022 and beyond:
What is Lasso and how exactly do you help healthcare and pharma brands?
In the market, we describe ourselves as an operating system for healthcare marketers. So, what do we mean by that? Our product vision is to be a single comprehensive platform to meet all of the use cases and day-to-day needs of a healthcare marketer. Our first pillar is audience insight capabilities, tools to create and identify audiences that are relevant to healthcare, providers, patients, and specialists in the space. Next, our activation pillar allows you to take those audiences and activate them on whatever distribution platform or channel you want, including programmatic, email, social, and CTV. Finally, the last pillar is to be able to measure the effectiveness of these communications, showing digital engagements and real world behavior. We help you answer the question of whether or not your tactics are actually driving more scripts, more visitations, more redemption of coupons, etc. We built our platform to be super modular, so agencies and brands can work with each pillar of our product separately as well. This gives us the flexibility to work with marketers of any size or shape or level of technical sophistication.
“One of the great things about working with you (Lasso) and your team is you guys are really transparent. Being able to have that modular offering allows us to really customize our recommendations and our strategy, not only by client but by campaign. I love that we can plug and play depending on what our clients' needs are. It’s been a great resource.” - Jennie Kitchin, Sr Account Director at Digilant
How does artificial intelligence and machine learning work across digital healthcare marketing?
It’s important to note that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are foundational pillars of programmatic advertising in general. These foundations are involved in real time bidding, fraud detection, and more. There are lots of exciting things happening around AI and ML that are specifically making the data products and strategies around healthcare marketing much more advanced. Some of the things we’re doing at Lasso are already taking advantage of these technologies. First and foremost is producing our audiences, specifically our patient audiences. The ML elements that allow us to produce privacy safe and compliant patient level audiences. This means predicting people that are likely to be current or future takers of certain medications, sufferers of a particular condition, and other clinical filters. We use a similar concept on the provider side as well. Static target lists for HCPs have been in use for quite some time now but that only provides a part of the story. What we use, and Digilant has been a great partner in taking advantage of these advanced capabilities, is longitudinal analysis of the claims data to not just show what your providers have done in the past but also what they will be doing in the future.
Some of the things we’re really excited about is the advancement of engagement scoring. Layering all the data that we have from digital comms perspective, showing propensity for where providers and patients within relevant patient and therapeutic areas are going to engage and how that translates to real world outcomes.
Let’s dive into your data partners - which ones do you work with, how are they unique, and how granular you can get with the data?
Lasso is data agnostic, we want to work with whatever solution is best for our customers to get the job done, especially if our clients have trust in a particular data partner. DMD and IQVIA is where we get a lot of our provider based consent, specialty data, and real time authentication. We also work with a number of different aggregators like PurpleLab, Symphony Health, and Netwise. We’re constantly looking for new and novel data sources as we continue to innovate and grow while prioritizing consent and precision.
With the cookieless future approaching, can you dive into how your data and solutions are protected?
From the Lasso perspective, the whole initiative around cookieless aligns with our core value proposition. We’re built around determinism, transparency and consent, which are all things we hold dearly when we create our audiences and campaigns. All products we build should be the same in the future proof sense: at the deterministic user level not at the cookie level. We’ve taken this approach from the early days, back when cookieless was just a buzzword, by building our own identity solution in-house.
We license identity data and clinical data from all different sources to create a fully consent based provider and consumer identity solution. Everything is based on offline data and hashed email data, all very easily verifiable and deterministic. Our solution is never based on cookies or device id, anything that may be going away in the future. This proactiveness and innovation on our end allows us to adopt cookieless technology really quickly. For example, the Universal ID. Because our solution is already really robust with hashed email, that’s allowed us to natively key those Universal IDs onto our identity solution for audience creation already.
We currently already have two Universal IDs and we’re actively testing more. We want to continue being a leader in this space and help more people adopt this technology. We’re also considerate of publishers out there who have 1st party data and are concerned about their monetization. We want to make sure we are also providing them with the tools to quickly adopt this technology in order to keep the ecosystem as frictionless as possible.
Describe how using an omnichannel approach helps drive script lifts and awareness for HCPs and consumers.
The north star is always the health and real world outcomes. We get there through precise audience targeting, reaching the right providers and the right patients. Omnichannel is the pathway to get that reach, and we have data on them and consent from them. Adding a new channel can give you an incremental reach or engagement that weren’t possible before. We believe each of those channels needs to be part of the mix. More importantly, marketers need to be evaluating each channel and how they speak to each other.
One of the things we’ve had great success with Digilant is actually evaluating the effectiveness of those omnichannel approaches. Our case studies show that designing and deploying audiences across programmatic and social increases overall engagement and script lift across the board. Running coordinated messages to HCP & their consumers with a triggered approach dramatically increases performance. The Key is to find the right partners to launch and execute these strategies, and partner with tech solutions like Lasso to provide the right data and integrations to activate.
“We’ve seen such a difference running on Lasso by applying those Trigger strategies. But also we typically see higher match rates with Lasso. One of the things I love is whenever I upload a list or build out a strategy for a client, I see email, social, and display have higher match rates. Not only are we able to help break into new channels for our clients but it’s fast and you know that you’re going to get the optimal reach and frequency with your top prescribers.” - Jennie Kitchin, Sr Account Director at Digilant
Typically we see higher match rates when we run with Lasso, can you dive more into your methodology? Why does this matter?
We champion high match rates and active reach as a platform. We describe it a bit differently than the way it is typically described in the market. We refer to it as active reach. A lot of folks are familiar with the legacy method of having a specialty target and getting a static offline match. But an offline match only goes so far, it doesn't tell you how many people you can actually reach, especially with digital marketing. We take that to the next level by providing detailed match rates across the channels we can activate. All those match rates are provided in real time, and you’ll get results in seconds. These are matched to our graph and returned right to the platform. That gives you the numbers of deterministic users that you have consent to reach across social, email etc. We can do that because we built our identity solution directly in-house. No third parties or vendors along the way which result in lower match rates, data loss and delays. Because we get real time authentication and consent through HCN, DMD and IQVIA, our solution is updated in real time. Sometimes within minutes or hours of uploading, the same list will actually have increased results because we’re constantly pulling down the most updated identity data for those individuals. This is important because this reach generates outcomes for your campaigns. If you’re not saturating and penetrating the audience then you’re not taking advantage of every opportunity to engage. It’s hugely important to constantly think about what is the best active reach and how that impacts your results.
What is the optimal strategy to drive reach and frequency amongst HCPs & Consumers while still being HIPAA compliant?
We are proponents of the omnichannel approach regardless of HCP or DTC campaign. As mentioned before, you’re going to have some level of incrementality with each new channel. One challenge for using multiple channels is that the frequency capping can be difficult. However, that becomes much more seamless and fluid when operating with a technology partner like Lasso. Because everything is all self-service on one platform, you can consistently and fluidly reach your targets across all channels.
In terms of strategies specifically for HCP or DTC campaigns, this can vary by therapeutic area. With large patient and provider populations like primary care or heart disease, it’s much easier to identify those populations. With more narrow conditions, it can be harder to understand who the relevant practitioners are in safe and compliant ways. That’s why it’s important to have those active reach numbers be as deterministic and real time as possible so you get an accurate idea of who you can actually hit this month.
This is something Digilant has been really forward thinking about: updating and refreshing your targets. Maybe in the past not refreshing and updating your audiences worked, but now there are a lot of practitioners defining themselves along the way. As we get more claims data and more script writing, it’s really important to constantly refresh from a clinical perspective to understand how your targets have evolved. Make sure you’re hitting the right folks in the right places, and layer omnichannel approaches with the right data.
Describe how brands can leverage various reporting data within Lasso’s reporting suite to show success, optimize, and overall get smarter on their campaigns.
From day 1, Digilant has always leveraged our processed daily physician level and impression level data as well as their own internal data. This is exactly what we promote for everyone. Our opinion is that accurate data should be table stakes. Getting aggregated results post campaign really doesn’t cut it anymore from a marketing perspective. In order to optimize and make strategic decisions in-flight, you need to get those insights in real time. It’s essential to have user and impression level data that can be actioned on, particularly for an omnichannel approach. That way you can understand who you exposed in each channel and how you move them on to a new tactic and new sequence.
As a tech and data company, making sure automated reporting features are free and accessible daily for all our customers is hugely important for the industry. Our whole ethos is democratizing the real world data and making that available for any healthcare marketer. Through the Lasso platform, we have script level data and activity used on a gross methodology updated weekly for every tactic, as real time as claims will allow.
We also have full net impact analysis which can be updated on a monthly basis on any digital activity run through Lasso or outside of Lasso. This way, you can get the level of real world behavior across digital media, not just what you are doing with one particular vendor. This is important because we have a great partnership with Digilant, but Digilant is certainly executing through other vendors with other strategies, and they should be evaluating all of those combinations so they can dedicate more resources to the best performing tactics. Digilant has been really successful by leveraging that data and insights to make hands on keyboard optimizations. The key is making sure you’re not just setting it and forgetting it but constantly evaluating yourself, your strategies and your partners.
“You guys make it really easy. We’re able to tap in and analyse and pivot from there. A lot of it relies on the omnichannel approach and recognizing and encouraging our clients to take that approach because some things are going to work better than others. To be able to pull the levers and have the insights to know which levers to pull, that’s going to be what really moves your business forward.” - Jennie Kitchin, Sr Account Director at Digilant
Where do you see the future of healthcare advertising?
Some of the things we’re really excited about and actively working on are activating new channels for engagement with providers and consumers. A lot of well known and established channels like endemic publishers exist in a walled garden that we want to make sure we start to make available and democratize. Our goal is to give tools to both marketers and publishers and make sure that becomes a channel at the forefront of any omnichannel strategy. There are also novel channels, like electronic health records and digital points of care, that we are going to be investing in over this year.
Plus it’s important to consider the level of innovation that is happening in the healthcare industry broadly, like the record breaking funding in the digital health industry. There are more products for traditionally underserved communities coming into the market, and we’re excited to help power the growth of those companies with new strategies where they might not have the tech or data capabilities like bigger pharma companies.
Outside of all of that, we will of course be continuing to advance and evolve our data integrations and AI.
“One of the things I love about your team is that you’re constantly innovating. So there are constantly new things we can bring to our clients and say, 'hey I know we tested this last month, next quarter why don’t we throw this into the fold and see how it works.' You guys are constantly bringing things to the market that make it more fun for us to add to our tool kit.” - Jennie Kitchin, Sr. Account Director at Digilant
