Nicholas Lucente
Director, Consumer & Digital Marketing
AstraZeneca
Establishing a Slew of Industry Firsts
In just under five years at AstraZeneca, Nick Lucente has gone from an industry-outsider to one of the company’s brightest stars as he leads the omnichannel marketing transformation of the U.S. Cardiovascular Franchise.
Nick started his career at AstraZeneca in 2016 as a Digital Marketing Manager. Shortly thereafter, he was selected to AstraZeneca’s Rising Leaders Program—a prestigious initiative to identify and cultivate top talent. In 2020, Nick continued to be recognized as an emerging leader and was promoted to Director of Consumer and Digital Marketing. That same year, Nick was also recognized as a Top 25 DTC Marketer by DTC National.
Despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, Nick led the consumer marketing team to have one of their best years yet—securing 14 different awards, recognitions, and finalist nominations across both branded and unbranded initiatives. Nick’s impact on marketing at AstraZeneca has been felt far and wide, from his industry-first innovations to his evangelism and global marketing training initiatives.
For example, during the pandemic, Nick led the first virtual DTC shoot for Brilinta. The campaign featured Bob Harper and his real-life partner, which also made it the first time an AstraZeneca campaign included a same-sex couple. In his time working on the brand, Brilinta has reached all time-highs in brand awareness, ad recall, and recognition.
Nick has led plenty of other innovative initiatives as well. He helped launch Universal Language Standards within AstraZeneca—a first-of-its-kind patient centricity initiative to improve access and ease-of-understanding of all patient materials. He also launched the first user-generated content software at AstraZeneca in 2018 for the unbranded “Survivors Have Heart” program, generating hundreds of user submissions across social media and website. And in 2021, he launched AstraZeneca’s first “Hack the Super Bowl” initiative, which lead to an industry-first partnership with Tremor Media that allowed the company to reach Super Bowl viewers at home while they multi-screened on apps and social media.
This unprecedented transformation in such a short time has also led to impressive results, including an ROI on media and DTC campaigns over 2:1 and 5x growth in monthly patient registrations.
