Things are beginning to wind down here at DMA: 2010 in San Francisco. The exhibit hall is closed, booths are being broken down and packed away, and attendees are just making their way to the Moscone Center for 10 am conference sessions nursing their Echo Awards hangovers. Attendance at the 8:45 am sessions was, uh, light.
I listened in to two Pfizer marketers explain the differences between a multichannel marketing strategy for a launch product and a mature product. This being the pharmaceutical industry, no names of drugs were released for the case studies, nor any specific results. While the Pfizer marketers may have talked in generalities on several points, I think they nicely summed up one of the most important takeaways from the Direct Marketing Association show.
After Melina Leone, director of multichannel planning for Pfizer, explained the challenges of trying to “change the mindset” of doctors who were uninterested in a new drug the company had created to treat constipation in palliative care patients, she took the audience through the multichannel solution the pharmaceutical giant had created with its agency, Harte-Hanks. It included e-mail, multidimensional direct mail, sample kits, CDs and outbound calls.
But how do you decide on the right marketing approach? To paraphrase Leone: Make an educated guess on the right mix of tactics, monitor and measure the results as the campaign goes live and then adjust and optimize the strategy based on these learnings.
The Direct Marketing News team will be sticking around through the lunchtime keynote here at DMA: 2010, where Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter, Jeffrey Hayzlett (listed under the dubious title of “celebrity CMO” and David Jones, global CEO of Havas, among others, will be speaking, so expect more reports and videos as we close out this year’s show.
The DMA conference and exhibition moves to Boston next year.
UPDATE: David Jones was a no-show. Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, filled in for her boss.
