Consumers and healthcare practitioners have come to rely on digital platforms for medical advice, but as Google trumps nurses, pharmacists, and friends and family as the second most frequently named influencer of health decisions,* pharmaceutical companies are disproportionately silent in the digital space.

Many fear the wrath of ambiguous regulatory policies, but brands without a digital presence stand to lose their grip on the audiences that matter most.  Although 89 percent of internet users have looked for health information online, pharmaceutical marketers have largely ignored the digital habits of consumers and healthcare practitioners.

To quantify this discrepancy, L2 Think Tank founder Scott Galloway, has devised an annual Digital IQ Index for pharmaceutical brands. As the first study of its kind, the index ranks the digital acumen of dozens of pharmaceutical brands across site, social, search, and digital.

“The industry as a whole disappoints,” Galloway says, “as most brands offer obsolete technology, anemic content and scant social media programs.”  According to statistics from the first and second annual studies,** only 19 percent of pharmaceutical brands maintain a presence on at least one social media platform and less than one quarter of brands advertise on highly trafficked physician portal sites like Medscape, MDLinx, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

In response to the quality gap, users have voted with their browsers. Brands categorized as genius in the consumer study saw an average one year traffic growth of 175 percent while 40 percent of brands in the Digital IQ Index saw a decrease in website traffic.***

Although many brands are starting to catch onto direct-to-consumer marketing tactics, strategy for reaching healthcare practitioners online still eludes most pharmaceutical marketers.  31 percent of brands in the direct-to-consumer study earned Challenged or Feeble Digital IQs, but more than 60 percent of brands’ HCP efforts led to Challenged or Feeble status.****

Most brands are not purchasing HCP-targeted search terms, deploying email marketing programs, or investing in mobile or display advertising on physican portal sites.  This represents significant low-hanging fruit in the industry, but also huge potential losses amongst some of the industries most coveted influencers.

Fear of regulators may leave most brands silent and stifled, but the cost of not participating in the digital revolution will only increase over time.  Facebook ads alone have experienced a 45 percent year over year growth***** and the investment required to capture the attention of healthcare practitioners and consumers stands to rise.

As the digital revolution takes hold, pharmaceutical companies must find a way to follow in the footsteps of Genius brands like Pfizer, AstraZeneca for direct to consumer digital marketing, and Johnson & Johnson’s Concerta in their efforts to reach healthcare practitioners online.

For more information and tangible flashes of genius in the industry, download the Digital IQ Indices from l2thinktank.com/research/reports.

Lauren Procter

*         Capastrat & Public Policy Polling, April 2010
**       L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2010, L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2011
***     L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2010
****   L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2011
***** “Facebook Ad Prices Soar More Than 74 Percent”, Financial Times, July 2011Pharma

Bill Drummy, founder and CEO of Heartbeat Digital, said the difference between a traditional and a digital-focused agency is that digital is an interactive medium; it’s not interruptive like an advertisement.

William Martino, vice president, digital strategy, of Saatchi & Saatchi Consumer Health + Wellness, took an opposite prospective: “I think traditional agencies have a significant advantage over pure digital [agencies] because of a deeper understanding of the audience or the consumer. However, the traditional agency has to evolve, so they are not labeled.”

Eli Lilly would, ideally, like to have the best of both worlds. However, Lyndsay Younce, the company’s marketing consultant, said that Lilly hasn’t yet found one agency that can bring everything they need to the table.

For e-marketing space, Eli Lilly relies on digital agencies. “I don’t care if they have an integrated offering. But I want them to integrate well,” she said. “A lot of this has to do with the brand. It’s hard as an e-marketer to move away from the traditional advertising mentality, but you have to be able to speak that language in order to move. I have yet to see an agency come in with a specific measurement about their digital work.”

Both types of agencies have their pros and their cons. For example, according to Martino, a digital agency has the tendency to recycle ideas across brands with no understanding that audience and therapeutic areas are different.

“At the end of the day, a really good integrated plan is all about vision,” said Dorothy Wetzel, chief marketing extrovert of Extrovertic. “It really takes the brand team to consider all ideas and options and then put it together. The worse thing you can do is put agencies together and say to them, ‘Come up with a good integrated plan.’ The new school of thought is about building the number of brand advocates.”