PM360 Q&A WITH
FRANK BURREL
CEO
Deerfield Group
Frank Burrell is CEO of Deerfield Group, bringing more than 20 years of agency and client experience to implement marketing strategies across multiple therapeutic categories for specialty and retail products. Frank works as a valued partner to provide comprehensive marketing solutions
that not only drive revenue but can be easily integrated within a company’s infrastructure. He can be reached at frank.burrell@deerfieldgroup.com.
DOMINIC VIOLA
President of Integrated Marketing
Deerfield Group
Dominic Viola is president of integrated marketing at Deerfield Group. Over more than 25 years in
healthcare advertising, Dominic has built a consistent track record of success in building, growing,
and accelerating value for 50+ healthcare companies and 75 brands across industry areas
including Rx, device, diagnostics, payer, digital therapeutics, and health systems.
He can be reached at dominic.viola@deerfieldgroup.com.
TREVOR FUSARO
Chief Strategy Officer
Deerfield Group
Trevor Fusaro is chief strategy officer at Deerfield Group. With a BA in neuroscience, Trevor ran US and global clinical trials for major pharma before transitioning to pharmaceutical brand strategy as a consultant to pharma, and in healthcare agency leadership positions. He believes great brands require significant care and purpose-driven teamwork.
He can be reached at trevor.fusaro@deerfieldgroup.com.
PM360 asks three Deerfield Group experts about their intake and experience with creative marketing campaigns.
Omnichannel Marketing Efficiency:
PM360: Tell us how omnichannel marketing can be the right size-targeted way for clients to engage in all stages, rather than being an expensive effort?
Dominic Viola: If omnichannel is done correctly, it creates a lot of efficiencies. The challenge everyone has faced over the years is things have changed; we don’t consume information the way we did 15-20 years ago. Everybody has access; you can read through every news headline in ten minutes when you first wake up. So what we’re trying to do is create conversations and meet our customers where they are. Gone are the days of billboard advertising, when you just had to repeat the same thing to the same customer to get a reaction. Now it’s about building relevancy. It’s about bringing them in through a conversation and ultimately trying to provide support—the right education and treatment solutions to meet their needs. Especially with all the digital channels we have now, you can run a much more efficient, customized, and targeted smart campaign with an omnichannel plan. It also requires us to have more access to knowledge, making sure that we’re creating those partnerships with our clients to access their research and data, along with all our research and our data, because the more we have at our fingertips, the better we can customize.
Frank Burrell: At Deerfield, we’ve developed a flexible executional working model we call Agency of Brand®, which ensures clients have access to specialist teams, agile workflows, and the right insights and technology to effectively engage customers. We work with a lot of small to mid-size pharmaceutical companies that may not have the internal resources or technology to actually implement an omnichannel approach, but omnichannel doesn’t need to be scary.
What are healthcare and pharma companies getting wrong about marketing right now in this volatile landscape?
Trevor Fusaro: In the healthcare and pharma industry, you need to truly understand your customer, understand your competition, understand your brand…all of those things together, really understanding that insight, that’s what [should] drive action. When I think of smart marketing, I think about a lot of times how we see in pharma, they’re excited about their facts, features, product attributes, but they’re not putting it into the real world context of exactly who these individuals are [they’re marketing to]. One thing I’ll say about marketing, no one knows for sure what the right answer is. All we can do is put our best foot forward and take our best stab with strategic planning. Sometimes [marketers] get lazy and say ‘hey, our data is going to speak for itself,’ but we have to make sure it really does. In the past, [pharma marketers] have gone too heavy on science and mechanism of action. Nowadays, we nod to it. There are ways to use a scientific story to our advantage.
How do you harness meaningful insights for your clients?
Trevor Fusaro: The first step is determining the difference between a fact, an observation, and an insight. I remember working on a diabetes product when we started doing ethnography, we would walk into people’s houses and see they only [displayed] pictures of them as their slimmer selves, because they didn’t want to be seen in the state they’re in now with their weight up, their A1C up. It was an interesting thing to learn, but we couldn’t actually use that. It was a great insight, but the insight has to be leverageable. One of the things we were able to do is pivot and talk about the fact that there are versions of yourself you want to get back to. So, how can you take something you maybe can’t necessarily leverage? You can start to think about the people and what’s driving them. It’s the motivation you need to understand; you have to understand what the prompts are that you need to communicate in your messaging, to get them to capitalize on their own motivation.
How are you personally working together at Deerfield Group in what you’re offering, and what makes it special to have all that expertise under one roof?
Frank Burrell: We had the pleasure of working with Trevor and Dom, as strategic partners, which gave us an opportunity to serve clients together. There was a really strong cultural fit—a passion for the work and for people, and providing the best service possible to clients. That’s something we’ve always done here at Deerfield, making sure we’re meeting all the needs of our clients, that we’re bringing experts in the room, and making sure they get the best experience. We joke around that Dom and Trevor are unicorns. It’s rare to find people that have done and accomplished [what they have]. At the end of the day, being a full-service marketing and communications agency, strategy and brand planning are at the root of everything. The addition of the Embedded team deepens our strategic offering for clients and adds other passionate and experienced agency leaders to our executive leadership team. It really made sense to come together. There are a lot of different agencies, but we really provide passionate people that care about what they do, and work alongside clients in a way that is smart and efficient to maximize marketing efforts.
Dominic Viola: What was similar in our philosophies was the situational adaptation. These clients have different needs at different times within the life cycle of their brands. Some other partners, groups, and agencies are rigid in the way they handle things whereas we are trying to meet them where they’re at. We want to support them in a way that’s going to help them, not force them to completely change the way they’re doing things; we’re trying to fit and partner with them to become an extension of their team. We’re constantly looking at new ways, new products to develop, new strategic workshops to bring to the table, and new services to provide. We think of everything when we’re engaging with our clients; we try to understand them more holistically and the challenges they face as marketers as well as brands. Adding to what Frank mentioned about good chemistry and getting good people together to do great things, and Dom’s point of being situationally adaptive, we look at our own brands that way, too. Whenever the market is changing, you need to change.
