Pharma Firewalls Foretell the Future

Regular followers of this blog will know that I love a catchy title, so when the chance to throw in some alliteration presented itself, I couldn't resist.

By Jonathan Richman on Mar 25, 2009

Regular followers of this blog will know that I love a catchy title, so when the chance to throw in some alliteration presented itself, I couldn't resist. Today's post is going to be short and to the point. I've noticed a disturbing trend in talking with current and potential pharma clients that tells me that it isn't going to get any easier to do digital marketing solutions in the near future.

First a story...my company, Bridge Worldwide, is one of a handful of WPP agencies that is "certified" to deliver WPP's course for marketers called Digital Acceleration. It's a roughly full-day course that includes practical, hands-on lessons on everything from user generated content to social media to gaming to search to mobile marketing. The idea is that your average marketer walks out of the program with at least a passing understanding of many digital marketing channels (contact me if you're interested in having this for your company). One of the most important parts of the programs is the hands-on learning. Of course, you get a lot more out of any lesson if you're forced to participate. So, that's what we do. For those who don't have one, participants will create a Facebook and MySpace profile, start a blog, upload photos to Flickr, set up an AdWords program and many, many more activities. This is all pre-work, as we build on these basics in the program (e.g., adding applications to your Facebook page). Many of you likely take these basics for granted, but they are far from basic in many companies and here's where I noticed the problem.

We were invited to deliver this Digital Acceleration program at a large (top 5) pharma company. They were (are?) enthusiastic about rolling it out to the marketing teams. We shared the scope of the program and the pre-work and got great buy in. However, when it came time to practically doing the program, we hit a snag. Turns out that no one in this company could access most of the sites required for the pre-work. No Facebook, no MySpace, no YouTube just to name a few. There's an internal firewall blocking access to all these sites. Presumably, this is to keep people from slacking off at work (not that I agree that using these sites is slacking).

Here's the real effect...you've created a generation of marketers in your company that don't know the benefits of these types of platforms because they aren't exposed to them. I know many of the people at this particular company and they work very hard. They are in early and stay late. They don't have time to go home and investigate the different digital marketing channels on their home computers. If they are going to learn marketing and what's out there, they are going to do it at work.

But they can't.

The result...an impossible situation. The brand team members can't see the benefits of these new channels because they don't fully understand how they work. There's a bunch of frustrated agency partners who don't know where to begin when they are told to bring new ideas. And there's also an executive suite that wants to do what other industries are doing digitally and can't understand why their company isn't doing it.

In order to create digital programming, you have to live it. If you want your company to understand Facebook and similar social media platforms, for example, you probably need to allow them to access it. Case in point, our company Facebook page has 187 members...not a lot by many standards, but 85% of our employees are members of the group. When you ask us about Facebook, we can tell you everything about it. The good, the bad, the ugly and those little things that only come from using it everyday. That's the information that is really valuable. It's the information that only comes from experience and doing it.

So, this one goes out to all the senior healthcare/pharma senior leaders out there. You say you want your company to be digitally savvy, well then you'd better let them. Take down the firewalls. You trust your people not to do a lot of other stupid things that could jeopardize the company much more than what providing access to YouTube might create. If this is your worry, then you need to go. You can't have both. You can't expect your people to be smart when it comes to digital and then not let them use digital. The simplest analogy I can give is this. Imagine Delta decided that their pilots only needed to read about flying (and it was optional) as their training to fly a 747. How do you think they'd fair? I'm betting they wouldn't be able to get off the ground, but hours in the flight simulator would change all that. Are you letting your teams into the simulator or are you asking them to fly before they've even seen a plane?

Going back to the title of this post...if things don't change, the firewalls of today foretell a bleak picture for pharma digital marketing in the future.

Jonathan is Director of Business Development for Bridge Worldwide, a leading digital and relationship marketing agency, and regularly writes about pharma marketing on his blog Dose of Digital. Feel free to send him a tweet to @jonmrich.