Kathleen Herowanto
Director, Omnichannel Media
Novo Nordisk Inc.
Spearheading Advanced Analytics
Audience unification and use of advanced analytics may be newer to the industry, but it’s not new for Kathleen Herowanto—she’s been leading Novo Nordisk to implement these with consistency and discipline for years. In fact, advanced analytics are at the core of Kathleen’s strategy. She relies on data to understand media impact and has used an advanced analytics toolkit to adjust the brand media strategies to achieve optimal investment and to maximize a brand’s commercial effectiveness and impact.
After a seasoned tenure on the agency side, Kathleen joined Novo Nordisk as part of the Patient Centric Strategy and Solutions team, where she was able to demonstrate the business impact value of paid media in order to secure incremental funding to meet ever-changing marketplace needs. She was later hand-picked by Novo Nordisk’s executive leadership to run its newly formed media functional area across all paid media efforts.
Kathleen’s progressive approach has pushed the boundaries of Novo Nordisk’s traditional media strategy, resulting in groundbreaking results. In four years, she has expanded Novo Nordisk’s paid media footprint from four to 35 brand campaigns and counting. She has re-codified how Novo Nordisk assesses the impact of their DTC media—holding the patient at the center of performance versus disparate channel-based metrics. Kathleen spearheaded this change, pushing the company to think of success in terms of patient behavior (e.g., Did a consumer see my ad and go to the doctor? Did the consumer fill a prescription?) instead of channel-by-channel media metrics that focus on exposure.
Ultimately, by using a broad dataset, she and her teams have expanded beyond demo and geo attributes to assess campaign and channel performance from a patient-first perspective. This change in strategy allowed Kathleen and her teams to optimize their campaigns like never before. One SEO/SEM brand pulse test drove over $2.5 million in efficiencies, while increasing site traffic and engagement by more than 10%.
