Julie Hurvitz Aliaga
Senior Vice President, Social Media
CMI/Compas
Changing the Industry’s Approach to Social
“In pharma, it can be hard to be first to do something; our industry wants to know something has been done before so we have a clear path to success. But with her leadership in social media, Julie Hurvitz Aliaga has really taken away a lot of the heavy lifting for the entire industry,” says Ryan Billings, Senior Director, Oncology Digital Marketing & Customer Experience, GSK. “In particular, she has removed a lot of the stigma around reaching HCPs with social media. But the work she has done in social media on the consumer and patient side is just as groundbreaking.”
Over the past few years, Julie led her team to deliver pharma industry-wide firsts on social, including the first unbranded pharma Instagram Stories ad in the MS space, first branded pharma Reddit ad, first branded pharma LinkedIn InMail as part of a pilot offering, and the first pharma ads without profile placement on Twitter.
And to accomplish all of that, Julie worked hard to build the dedicated social team at CMI/Compas. Over the past three years, she has grown the team from three to more than 40, and she hasn’t stopped with this exponential growth. Julie recognized that if she and her team educated and made ambassadors of all of the client-facing individuals at CMI/Compas, their reach would go across every major pharma company in the country.
This mindset led to her orchestrating a Social Media Day to integrate social and emerging media into the mainstream for planning across all CMI/Compas clients, which represents a majority of the industry footprint. It resulted in a change in the way that pharma plans media as a whole—as well as tripling the number of plans that included social media. She brought together leaders from Snap, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more to present alongside the CMI/Compas social media team.
“She thinks people first, while still pushing our team ahead, helping build out new products within our social team,” says Justin Freid, EVP, Growth & Innovation, CMI/Compas. “She put us one step ahead of everyone else in the healthcare industry.”
