Right audience, right channel, same message

Recently, I reviewed an HCP email program built around distinct audience segments and personalized journeys. Many of those journeys relied on essentially the same approved emails, delivered in different sequences. There’s value in adjusting what physicians receive and when.

But looking at the program, I wondered how much we were actually learning about the messages themselves.

I’ve seen this tension in pharmaceutical media more broadly. We have increasingly sophisticated tools to determine who should see an ad, where it appears, and when it’s delivered. Changing the message, then learning whether the change helped, is often harder. We’ve become better at optimizing media delivery than at using what we learn to inform what we say next.

Why getting another message into market is so difficult

The problem isn’t a shortage of ideas for better messaging. It’s the work required to get each additional message into market. Creative development, regulatory review, and media activation often involve different teams, vendors, and timelines.

A relatively small library of creative can quickly become many individual files once you account for different publishers, formats, and platform requirements. That’s a tremendous amount of production work, but producing more files isn’t the same as developing more messaging variations. Much of the effort goes toward preparing existing creative for delivery rather than exploring what else might work.

Even when campaign data suggests an opportunity to try something different, acting on it can mean another cycle of creative development, approval, and deployment. Media performance can inform where the next dollar goes, but it doesn’t necessarily inform what the next advertisement should say.

What email sequencing can (and can’t) tell us

Let’s go back to the HCP email program I mentioned. Testing different sequences or delivery schedules using the same approved content can help us understand how order and timing influence engagement, provided the comparisons are properly designed. But that doesn’t tell us whether those were the right messages to begin with.

Would physicians respond differently to an email focused on efficacy evidence versus one about identifying appropriate patients? Perhaps one approach would perform better with a particular HCP audience, or perhaps there would be little difference. Either finding could be useful, but only if we’ve designed the test to compare the messages meaningfully, rather than just tracking which emails receive more clicks.

Sequencing and message testing answer different questions. Used together, they could help us learn not just how to deliver information, but what information is most useful to different audiences.

Make the next creative brief part of the test

Fixing this takes more than faster creative production. Even when teams conduct message research before launch, campaign findings still need a clear route into the next creative brief.

I believe brand, creative, and media teams should start campaign planning by agreeing on what they want to learn, not simply what they need to launch. Before producing different creative approaches, decide which messaging question you’re testing, what evidence would help answer it, and how the result could change a future creative investment.

Bring medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) teams into planning early so the proposed variations and their review requirements are understood. After launch, reporting should show which messages each audience received and how they responded, with the results interpreted in the context of how the test was conducted.

Then make the handoff explicit. Before the next creative brief is finalized, the brand lead should bring creative and media teams together to decide which messages to develop, refine, or test next. Those decisions should be recorded in the brief. Otherwise, the campaign may produce plenty of performance data without ever influencing the work that comes next.

The next time we evaluate an HCP campaign, I’d encourage us to ask a few questions beyond which audience or channel performed best:

• Did we test different messages, or just different ways of delivering them?

• What did we learn about how HCPs responded?

• Can we point to something in the next creative brief that changed because of those findings?

For me, the clearest sign that we’ve closed the feedback loop isn’t a better dashboard; it’s a creative brief that reflects what our last campaign taught us.