PM360 OCTOBER 2010

TRENDSETTERS

UPCLOSE with Stanley R. Woodland, CEO of CMI and Compas

BY JON BRULLOTHS

Stan Woodland formed Communications Media, Inc. (CMI), in 1989 as an industry-wide media planning and buying organization designed to serve pharmaceutical clients. In 1990, Compas was spun off from CMI to enable CMI’s 100% concentration on media planning, while developing an industry changing media buying business model with Compas.

PM360: How has the industry changed in the past few years with regard to media planning?

STAN WOODLAND: In the late ’80s, media’s role was primarily to create awareness and leverage the personal selling efforts of our clients. Today, media is tasked with creating engagement and facilitating dialogue among clients, healthcare providers, patients, and caregivers.

Media planning is completely different than what it used to be. It used to be that we were given a “primary care universe” and/or a “specialty universe” as a target audience. Now, the targeting is pinpointed at the individual physician level.

The media landscape has changed as well. The media planning process has really become much more complex with the rapid adoption of interactive, digital, and social media. Understanding how these new communication channels work together and with traditional media is important to successfully achieve our clients’ business goals.

Finally, we can achieve media accountability more so than in the past. As a result, the planning process is a much more dynamic and iterative process than it used to be. Once upon a time, you would develop a plan; for the most part, you would execute that plan and make adjustments along the way. Now, you start to get feedback within hours of launching a media program, and you begin to learn nearly in live time what’s working and what’s not. We’re able to adjust media programs accordingly to capitalize on that almost immediate feedback.

What changes do you foresee for media planners over the next few years?

What our planners are seeing are evolution and growth in what media suppliers are offering. They’re expanding their content delivery channels to include more digital and mobile vehicles, offering more opportunities for interactivity within their print and digital offerings.

Now media planners need to better understand the synergies among the various media channels in order to accomplish clients’ business goals. Frankly, they’re going to have to become experts in the media preferences and consumption habits of our clients’ target audiences. They will have to know even more about our clients’ targets than perhaps even what our clients know.

We see new media breathing new life into older channels and offering new integration opportunities such as 3D, bar codes in journals, augmented reality experiences, convention signage, etc. They’ll all bring a revolution of data mining to media that typically don’t have a reputation for being as sophisticated as their younger digital siblings. A lot of data will be available to convert to information, and ultimately productive action.

So what is the key to forming long-lasting relationships with clients?

First, it’s really important to anticipate our clients’ needs and proactively invest human, financial, and—more and more— technological resources to meet those needs. Second, wherever possible, we must align our business interests with theirs, basically having “skin in a game.” That can go a long way toward solidifying a long-lasting relationship.

A perfect example of what I’m talking about is our media buying model. It’s truly unique in that the more we reduce our client’s media costs while still achieving their objectives, the more compensation we earn—because we share in the incremental savings we create. This model is a true win-win partnership, perfectly aligned interest. We’re motivated on the buying side to reduce costs wherever we can without sacrificing quality.

How do you ensure the clients’ needs are being met and that your firm is performing at the level you want?

Well, it starts by establishing very clear expectations up front of what the client wants to accomplish, what our role will be in accomplishing those goals, and then executing a formal feedback process through which we ask them if we’ve met and, hopefully, exceeded those expectations. We also conduct a number of primary research studies with our clients’ customers to better understand their needs so we can align our clients’ objectives with the needs of their customers.

Additionally, over 80% of our media plans include a very specific measurement plan. So we have a way—and we ensure that we put in writing—how we’re going to measure the success of the media programs. If we’re accomplishing what we were hired to accomplish, then I think we will continue to do a good job of meeting the needs of our clients.

What recent changes within CMI have been made to enhance your firm’s abilities?

Because our clients are relying more on their partners to help them, we have expanded our core competencies beyond just media planning. We have added an in-house primary research capability that has implemented over 20 custom ByDoctor OnDemand client studies in the past 12 months. We also created a group dedicated to brand strategy development, headed by a former marketing VP of a Top Five pharma company.

We’ve incorporated senior-level digital strategy expertise into our account management and planning groups. Through our 2009 acquisition of Singularity Design, we are now able to offer digital creative solutions that complement and illustrate our media and promotional recommendations. We now have a comprehensive data analytics and statistical analysis group to capture all of the data I’ve mentioned, to analyze it, and to convert the data into information that leads to actionable insights. So, that’s what that group is tasked with.

We have a new nine-person in-house technology group that is capable of iPhone and mobile app development. We’ve hired a dedicated resource to work exclusively with our supplier partners to collaboratively create innovative solutions to our targeting challenges.

The supplier community has a wealth of content, and content is the key ingredient to attracting an audience and creating value for them. The more we can collaborate and work with suppliers to create and leverage that content, the more value we can bring to our clients’ target audiences.

Lastly, we’ve added Dr. Susan Dorfman to the team. She’s joined CMI to develop a wide range of data and information services in the form of actionable marketing intelligence dashboards and promotional effectiveness tools. As you can see, we’ve been busy.

On the technology side, what technological changes, like the advent of mobile platforms such as Twitter, mobile web, apps, iPad, and Android, do you see being of use to you and your clients?

We believe mobile, in general, will offer tremendous opportunity for our clients to reach, interact, and create dialogue with their customers in ways that were never possible before. So much so, that a few months ago I presented all 120 of our employees with their own iPads. As you can imagine, they were shocked.

While it was a gift, I wanted each of them to be in the position where they could experience firsthand how these technologies are going to change the way communication interaction will take place in the future. We’ve been learning a lot from real-world use of this technology and from a wide range of people.

So we see these platforms as providing our clients the opportunity to bring real value to physicians and patients in their quest to improve healthcare outcomes. No longer are they constrained by the traditional “pushing” of messages into the marketplace.

Rather, they can create relatively low-cost, but useful applications that help physicians treat patients and help patients care for themselves by becoming better-informed consumers of healthcare. In doing so, I believe they can create an even stronger connection with our clients’ brands than promotional messages can achieve by themselves.

The interactivity of these new technologies allows our clients to become a part of the discussion taking place around their brands and the conditions that they treat. Rather than having to talk at their customers, they can now speak with their customers.