Change Agent: Evolving Our Data-Led Approach

At PHM, embracing change and innovation in our day-to-day work is part of our DNA. Enter the Change Agents—thought leaders who are experts in their respective fields, helping to guide PHM and our clients through an ever-changing industry and media landscape. This series aims to highlight these thought leaders and their unique point of view as it relates to health media.

This month’s Change Agent—Kate Gattuso Duffy, SVP, Business Intelligence on the importance of an audience-led approach to measurement and optimization.  

The world of data is ever-changing. With the deprecation of cookies, advancements in AI technology and emergence of evolving data privacy concerns, implementation of an effective data strategy is paramount to achieve success and reach key audiences efficiently.

As early as five years ago, the role of the Business Intelligence (BI) practitioner was, in many ways, relegated to the results and measurement component of our campaigns. Our role was to analyze results after a campaign has concluded, with a much smaller opportunity for optimization. Over time, our roles have evolved significantly to become true partners in developing optimization strategy.

Now, instead of being data-driven, we like to say that we are data-led, with data at step zero. A data-led strategy means the strategic conversations about the media brief, business goals and campaign objectives yield a customized measurement approach to enable consistent optimization.

This requires a trifecta of talent—Investments, Strategy and BI—to bring equally valuable insight and perspective at the start of any campaign. This integration allows us to be more audience-led in our approach and keep our audiences at the forefront of our strategy. Instead of focusing solely on a channel or tactic, an audience-led approach allows us to be more relevant and hyper-focused as they move through different stages in their treatment journey. We can approach patients and providers at the right place at the right time, and then purposefully optimize our strategies to adjust for changes in behavior, while integrating the experience. This allows the approach to be much more specific, impacting how we think about investment and reducing waste. An audience-led perspective allows us to activate on the true promise of an omni-channel strategy—a targeted approach, custom-built for each channel with our audiences in mind.

At PHM, we pride ourselves in being health data experts, fully equipped to guide clients and partners. On any one campaign, we can have multiple sources of data that require processing, standardization, automation, and interpretation. These data sets allow us to get an overarching macro view of the patient landscape and the physician landscape, but also require a sophisticated management process to unlock their potential and marry it with additional business data to connect the true strategy of omnichannel media analytics to business outcomes. We solution together on the correct data flow to achieve unique business goals, while creating a data management process that is automated, clean and accurate.

PHM’s PeopleCloud Physician is a great example of this data management process in action. As our HCP data sources grew, we saw the need to standardize and automate how we ingest and interpret this data. This standardization further equips PHM and our clients with the tools to match data from thousands of tactics with the same reach, engagement and conversion metrics to continually build and optimize our data strategies.

PHM’s Business Intelligence team is built on PHM’s core principle—reimagining the health experience. When I came to PHM almost seven years ago, I was blown away by how the spirit of reimagination was embedded in what we did each day, and that spirit still lives on. We have, of course, evolved with scale, with better processes, procedures, templates and playbooks to approach our day-to-day work, but there is always this need and interest to experiment and be more entrepreneurial in the way we find solutions. Everyone is committed to finding new and interesting solutions to our current data technology challenges, as well as developing our perspective on everything emerging in the space. This approach has allowed us to grow our capability exponentially and lead the charge in the industry, enabling us to approach our work with a data-led, audience-led approach, optimized for business and health outcomes.

Connect with Kate on LinkedIn.

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