Pharma ROI – RIP or SOP?

The theme of the event was Return on Investment in pharma marketing, with one of the key strands being ROI for emarketing. Having been to a number of conferences on this topic over the past few years, there has been an evident sea change in the general sentiment of the delegates from uncertainty and disbelief three or four years ago, to cautious optimism last year, through to a general feeling of enthusiasm at this particular event. Admittedly, this is a self-selecting audience – it’s unlikely anyone would attend without at least a passing interest in moving marketing in pharma to the next level. And a cursory glance of the delegates list revealed that over half of the audience was made up of advertising agency, publishing and service vendor executives, who can all declare an interest.
It is incontrovertible though that the pharma corporate speakers and delegates, from companies as diverse as AstraZeneca and Napp, seemed united in the feeling that e-business has a key role to play in addressing some of the burning issues that the industry faces – the declining success of the blockbuster model, decreasing margins, unsustainably large sales teams, and more.
In a workshop at the event, a group of around thirty delegates discussed ROI for e-business in pharma marketing in more detail, and some solid ideas were proposed – the importance of aligning an e-business programme to business objectives before looking at ROI; looking at both qualitative ‘soft’ ROI, as well as ‘hard’ quantitative, numeric and financial ROI; and building confidence in ‘C-level’ management through education, results, and management of expectations, that the e-business train is one that it would be remiss to miss.
We look forward to more events like this.
Some Google-based pre-event research failed to reveal a huge number of sophisticated eROI models, but we did manage to find a US digital agency which has written a song on the subject, with accompanying video – chapeau! Click the link below for some light amusement.

Links:
Want to sing the ROI song? Click here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2iIa7c03cs
Find out more about the PM Soc here.
http://www.pmsociety.org.uk/