How AI is Redefining Pharma Marketing

AI is transforming how patients search for health information, how brands communicate, and how trust is built in healthcare.

In this episode of The Patient Experience Podcast, Bob Miglani is joined by Dan Seewald, former Head of Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer, TED Talk keynote speaker, and Founder of Deliberate Innovation. Dan is also the Co-Founder and CEO of LiviWell, a FemTech medical device company, and brings deep experience helping organizations solve complex challenges through design thinking, AI, and rapid problem solving.

Together, they explore how AI is redefining pharma marketing, from faster content creation and AI-driven insights to true personalization and shifting from one-to-many to highly targeted, trust-based engagement. They also unpack the growing patient confusion crisis and what pharma leaders must do to educate patients more effectively in a Direct to Patient world.

This episode is for pharma brand leaders, patient services teams, and marketers looking to apply AI in a practical, meaningful way.

Learn more about Dan Seewald at www.deliberateinnovation.net or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Patient Experience Podcast explores how pharma patient services leaders and patient-facing teams can navigate a growing patient confusion crisis as therapies become more complex and the industry moves Direct to Patient. Hosted by Jason Grossman, a 25-year pharma commercial, patient services, and marketing executive, and Bob Miglani, former Pfizer leader and CEO of Hoot, each episode delivers practical insights leaders can use and reps can apply in the field to better educate patients, build trust, and drive better outcomes.

New episodes are recorded live on Bob Miglani’s LinkedIn and published across major podcast platforms.

Follow the hosts:
Bob Miglani on LinkedIn
Jason Grossman on LinkedIn

Learn more at GetHoot.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Bob Aglani. I am super excited to welcome you to our patient experience podcast. The world is changing in pharma when it comes to patient experience, patient services, patient education, marketing. So much of what we knew 10 years ago has dramatically been shifting from direct to patient models to rebates to PBMs to how patients today are changing and call centers or going away. Are they? I don't know. Let's talk about it. We are here to help you navigate all of that in your job, in your career, in your company, and in your role that you do, that's so important. My name is Bob. I've been in Pharma Healthcare for about 30 years. And then Jason, my co-host, Jason Grossman, biotech executive, ultra-rare, rare disease, many different organizations. But the point is, we're gonna bring you the very best in terms of how to grow a beautiful patient experience for your brand, for your company, for your career, for your for your business. And that's what this is about. So welcome to the podcast. Let's get started. Hello, my name is Bob McLani. We're delighted to welcome you to um a really important episode. We're all talking about AI, AI and pharma, and how specifically it's reshaping marketing. Yes, marketing, AI and marketing, and how it's rethinking and allowing us to rethink marketing. And I've got an amazing guest, a really terrific guest, Dan Seawald. Dan, tell us about you and how you're we're gonna get into it, but tell us about you, where do you come from, what your background is, and why people should listen to you, Dan, to listen to both of us here. All right, so go tell us.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yeah, thanks, Bob. Great to be on. And you know, the short of it is that we and I've been on the front lines of innovation marketing in AI for several years. Before people were talking so much on the day-to-day about AI, we were not just predicting, but doing in this space. And we continue to work in this space actively at deliberate innovation. And uh a couple words just about my background, so you have a little more context about who I am. Um, I am uh former industry, like many folks, spent many years inside of pharmaceuticals and advisory consulting, uh, was a head of innovation at Pfizer for a number of years. We were always experimenting, even early on, with things like ML, machine learning, cognitive computing, to run experiments in that space. It's a world different today. Since then, past seven years, running a consulting practice called Delivered Innovation. It's all about rapid problem solving where we do use AI. Um, we stitch it through many different processes and we do a lot of agentic work now to be able to be efficient and smart in how we do things. On the other side of the coin, I also am a consumer of marketing AI services in that I run a medical device startup business. So I live in both worlds where I help other customers, but I also am a customer, also. So I'm always looking to see what do we need as well as what do other people need. So excited to get into it and talk about AI. It's one of my favorite topics. It's not going away, by the way. It's not going away.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Yeah, it's not going away. In fact, more and more people are utilizing AI in writing emails to Excel spreadsheets, some models, maybe contracts and things like that. But pharmaceutical marketers, I know that you know, a lot of pharma companies there. Let's let's talk about like what it used to be, where we are and where we're headed. Okay, let's talk a little bit about that in marketing, pharmaceutical marketing. You have a product that that is coming. This is again, let's say, let's talk about years ago, what happened real quickly to recap for people and where how things have shifted dramatically. You get a product that's approved, and of course, you're working for months and perhaps years on getting launch preparedness, getting that going. And you've got your speaker programs, you've got all this work that you're doing to build up the brand and educating doctors, congresses, papers, vis aids for Salesforce, promotional material, getting all that ready. And then we launch and we go and do it, and it's a blockbuster, you you know, woo-hoo, we hit a home run, right? To today, fast forward now, how has the world changed in terms of pharmaceutical marketing? Let's just pay put aside AI for the moment, Dan. Talk to us about what are the two or three things that have changed dramatically since years ago when we did pharmaceutical marketing.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah, I mean, a lot more than a and then multiple things or a few things have changed, Bob. But you know, just to maybe go back a number of things that have dramatically been transformed, the speed of copywriting, it's it is completely been revolutionized. It's sad to say because I used to think copywriting was one of my fortees. I was uh I'm a writer, I I love writing. And then when I put something through Claude or Perplexity, I'm like, damn, that was better. Or it revised what I did in a way that I couldn't have done before. That is revolutionizing. And that sort of, as you kind of indicated before, it's table stakes. So you take it up another level. One of the things that we're seeing over and over again is the change in how we actually do creative. So you think about creative campaigns. You can launch a creative campaign in literally an hour. It would take weeks, sometimes months. And I know people are gonna say, yeah, that's overstated. It is the biggest threat to ad agencies because it takes the strategic and creative piece, which we saw as uniquely human, and it has now made it artificial, um, but so, so native feeling, so authentic, you wouldn't know that it's artificial. So that's creating tremendous pressure at the strategic and creative level. But then if you take it one more level, many of the things that we did from field being a field force liaison, creating messaging campaigns, creating tools for you know your field force to symposia, many of these things which had a lot of different micro steps and required incredible coordination, are now slowly becoming agentic. And people hear agenc all the time. All that means is essentially that we've created agents that are doing the work that if you had a thousand interns working for you, really smart interns, it would be like turning that on like that. So that is changing the staffing, the bandwidth, and the speed at which you could do things. But there is a big proviso or caveat, and I'm sure this is probably on your list of things to talk about, but we are artificially slowing things down in this industry. I've seen this very much firsthand. Tell me. There's the guardrails, and they're not, you know, they're they're not ill-advised. This is not throwing a grenade and say, oh, you know, regulatory and compliance, MLR is getting in the way. They play a vital role. But what's really getting the way, I see, is that there is an asymmetry in knowledge on the reg side, on the legal and compliance side, in terms of what's permissible and where should we experiment. So much so that people are shutting off note takers in meetings, which is, I mean, is again a table stakes AI feature or capability. They are stopping projects right in the beginning because they're saying, we don't know. So therefore, don't do anything. Bad news for those companies, you are already falling so far behind that you're gonna cause the immolation of your own business in the not distant future. So there is a lot of precarious, overly conservative approaches that are being taken. And largely, I think it's just from places of not knowing enough and being fearful.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah. Yeah. I think the lawyers are very fearful, and they're the ones who are stopping the pharmaceutical marketing, you know, leaders from moving forward. I mean, it's rightly so, right? It's they have a lot at stake when it comes to the FDA and speaking out of regular authority, you know, speaking out of the out of the PI, right? The package insert. So I think that's important, but you to your point, you're losing a lot of opportunity to get things right. Because, you know, the other thing I'm seeing, Dan, is you know, this mass market to personalization and you know, moving from segmentation to personalization, patients today are really, I mean, there's niche, niche, niche, niche markets. Yes. So when you're marketing to niche markets as a pharmaceutical marketer here, you know, you've got to really understand the nuances and traditional ad agencies don't have that. And so, unless you're really, so you can you can actually prompt AI to say, you know, I want you to do all this research and we understand how a certain population thinks, acts, and behaves, yeah, based on documented research. And based on that, here's our label, you know, and then poof, you know, write me a message, you know, something like that, right? So I'm simplifying, I'll oversimplifying it, then of course, but the notion is that this AI, this the AI can do it so much better, faster, cheaper. And I think the lawyers are having a feel there, it really could, and they're almost concerned about their jobs too, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Well, that is that is an undertone. I was just out in uh Silicon Valley last week working with a client, a non-pharmaceutical client. They had the same exact problem. I was actually surprised. Um, very sophisticated semiconductor company that has a room full of engineers. And the challenge they were working on was how might we apply artificial intelligence to speed up our workflow so that we have faster time to market and satisfy the hyperscalers, companies like Google and uh and Meta and so on. And the challenge is that they really are very much worried about the fundamental issues of what does this mean for my job? Am I putting myself out of work? Um I already behind, do I not know enough? And this is in Silicon Valley. So if they're concerned about this, there's double concern in biotech and pharma. And I'll just come back to something you said about niche or rare disease populations. That is a great, great use case, an example of a business that can be tremendously valued by using AI. For example, you have a patient who has Rhett syndrome, small population, not always easy to identify. It is incredibly valuable if you use your tools and your methods to be able to not just kind of build a persona around them and message them, but to find them, to find the ways that they communicate and connect. And you can do that very rapidly, creating some agentic tools and just using some basic prompting. It can change the way you connect, find and relate to your customers. So, but the secret is, Bob, I'm in my the the not-so secret secret, in my opinion, is that you have to practice, you have to use it. You cannot handcuff people. And by no means should you just say, we're using copilot, and that's it. Copilot is not AI, right? Bad news for Microsoft, they probably are going to come target me after this. It's not a bad tool, yeah, but it's not truly AI.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

Yeah, I've heard it all day long, and you just said it. I heard it yesterday, I heard it before. Oh, where you know, a corporate pharma is using Teams for calls, not Zoom, right? And they're using copilot everywhere. And I had a friend and I asked him the other day, by the way, you know, our kids play basketball together and he works for a big pharma company. And I said, Hey, how are you using AI? He says, Oh, I use Copilot because on SharePoint, there's all these documents, and we're trying to figure out what's on the document. I'm like, I'm like, bro, that's not that's not AI, right? That's just like Google trying to do an internal search, trying to figure out where your stuff is.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

It's a starting point. And you know, I'll I'll just a quick another quick anecdote is a client of ours who we love dearly, they're great, and they've been progressive. Their leadership team, the most senior leaders, have said we need for our folks, our marketers, they're all kind of strategist marketers, to be more nimble and understand. So we did some basic literacy, and that was that went a long way of just even defining terms and vernacular and having that common language. But then actually doing prompting 101, teaching about prompting, understanding where to use it, how to use it, and what are the differences of co-pilot from other LLMs, other tools that are out there, why you might use them, and then also bringing in their team to say what's verboten and you can't do, and why, and what is permissible, and are there any workarounds to it? Having those conversations and practicing it on real use cases, it's it's unsubstitutable. You have to do it, it's not being done enough.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Yeah, I think the literacy is very important, AI literacy and being creative as a pharmaceutical marketer. Sure, I think you've hit on a very important point. And I want to expand that a little bit, uh, Dan, and and how we think about pharma. So we've we've talked a little bit about what's changed. Let's talk about where it's going and how AI can reshape a pharmaceutical marketer and you know what they can do better to advance, obviously, their career, but the brand and the objectives, the business objectives of the company. I think literacy is super important. For example, you know, I don't know if you've done this in the clients that you, the pharma clients that you work with, of like, hey, let's find out the the most successful pharma rare disease launches, for example, or or big brand launches, analyze the patterns, what's you know, what makes them so unique and how do they do that, and then design a strategy for your brand as a start with. But I don't know, are are brand managers or marketers thinking like that? Or are they still yeah, what do you tell me?

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Yeah, not enough. I I think just fundamentally they understand that the value of analogs or analogies. One of the things that that we do, and it's I don't think it's particularly unique to deliver innovation, but uh not enough people are doing this, is we start out by understanding exactly what the problem is, traditional problem definition, and really getting in the insights. But from there, what's different in using AI is that we can ask, where else in the world has this problem been seen? And that goes back to this technique called Tris. It was developed by a Soviet cosmonaut who was thrown in the gulag and had nothing better to do than to survive and try to think about this method, which they're called trisniks. They're usually scientists, engineers. But the very premise of that, of where else does this exist, was very hard to mine and unearth until now. Now you can use Claude and you can say, thinking about rare diseases, where else has a problem like this been faced before? And you will generate not just use cases, but the initial metaphors that go outside of your industry as well as inside the industry to serve as the template to guide you to think different. But what's even more about that, something that we love, I love doing, is once you take that, you can then synthesize. So you could say, just to make this up, what if we used the model that AOL used early on in the 90s to get market penetration? Right. Apply to a rare disease product, just making this one up completely off the top. So then you can go into Claude, you create, you know, you create your own project, train it, educate it on the market, which does not take very long because you can do it in a moment to upload things. And from there, you can start prompting saying, give me three ideas that you think are from mild to wild in terms of our market. You can iterate from there. And I think the secret, honestly, in prompting is not trying to do it in one giant bite, right? Small bites, iterate, learn, and improve because we have to do the same type of training for for AI as we do for ourselves. For me, I don't see this happening enough. And I think more importantly, it's it is a is a it's a trend breaker, it's a game changer for thinking differently for marketers.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

No, I I like that using frameworks. No, I love that. Using frameworks, tell us, you know, we'll put a link in the show notes here about truths. I'd love to learn a little bit about that and maybe some other content that you've done to help marketers. One way we're seeing this, Dan, as well, you talk about rare diseases, is that we know that there's a there's a 40% or so abandonment rate between the time the doctor writes a prescription to the time the patient fills it. So 40% don't fill. Yes. And you know, we've actually we've kind of heard this in the industry. We've also heard terms like gross to net in pharmaceutical patient services and so on. And so, you know, this is this these notions of understanding patient behavior is super important. So, one example I've seen utilized is, and we do this all the time here, is to understand how a certain patient feels because it's really important about their journey that they're going through. And one way to do that is really search communities. So you go to search online communities, whether it's you know, Reddit, and by the way, Reddit, a lot of Reddit informs Chat GPT, so it's you know, it's accurate, maybe, maybe not, not really sure.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Sentiment's real, the facts may vary. That's great point.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah, great point, great point. Because people don't really Google positive things, right? You know, they don't put in or they don't post positive things. It's like, what is the side effect of this drug? Am I on? Is this gonna kill me? Do I need to go to the emergency room? Where do I take the injection? My left shoulder, my leg, you know, it there medicine today, and that's the other point, is so complex. 92% of FDA approvals are for either oncology, autoimmune, neurology, rare or ultra-rare disease, which is so different from the pharma of the old. And so, really understanding those patients is vital. And there's so many sources to understand that. So, I think that's the other part of this is really understanding what's going to move patients forward from that low, you know, to 40% abandonment to fail. And it's not just about, hey, you know, you're gonna look, you know, this way as a traditional DTC ad might might do. It's a little bit more nuanced. And then asking those, you know, proactively answering those hesitation questions, and AI can do that very, very well, is to help you formulate the answers to potential hesitation questions that move a patient forward. Now, are you seeing that as well in some of the work that you're doing?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

I mean, you you you you raise a really interesting topic, and I don't see enough people doing this yet either, which is using AI to be able to integrate and then synthesize your secondary research data. So, and I'll give a real practical example of something I was just working on, but taking that secondary data that's there, um, taking research reports, syndicated data, um, manuscripts, and then taking the sentiment that could be in a Reddit um forum, but also even qual research that you might be doing, the interviews, and then bringing that together. It was very hard because it's non-structured. And having that non-structured data was the big blocker back in the day of, well, I've got data, but they have non-structured data. How do I bring sort of the sentiments and the verbatims together in a thoughtful way? But I found incredible success in using Claude, and this is no promotion specifically for Claude. We use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude. Um, from time to time, someone twists my wrist, maybe uh co-pilot. Yes, they do. Don't want to leave Gemini. They each have a different particular um niche that I find they're good for. But putting that aside for a moment, the project I that we specifically were trying to understand RX abandonment in the industry for a client and why the people abandon. And we wanted to to to parse out some of the obvious things like the You know, AE's side effects. We know that that's real. We know that that's a big driver, breaking out things like treatment burden regimen and so on, but understanding the purely human piece, which is hard to get to. So we're able to take research reports, data, and then I took dozens and dozens of interviews that I did with consumers, with professionals, um, with internal folks, colleagues inside an organization. And what we were able to find was about a dozen hotspots, flashpoints, which I would consider unmet needs that border on being a consumer-ish insight or customer insight. You couldn't do that before, but that's where AI really can unlock the potential and start helping you figure out how do I, you know, stanch the flow of abandonment. And that is a big issue, not just from a commercial standpoint. I mean, of course, it improves our gross to net, it improves the business. More importantly, it gets patients the right drug to be able to stand on it in the right way to help them, you know, in a and you know, address some of the underlying issues which are there and that are behavioral that are often overlooked because they're hard to get at.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Yeah, yeah. I think that stitching it all together is really important. And then these behavioral issues you're talking about, Dan, it's not just, you know, one drug or one category. It's all drugs today. And we're seeing that across the board because as we talked about, you know, it's no longer the primary care, primary care is dead, right? It's sort of this the go to the CVS, yes, you pick up the generic, but really everything is a specialty distribution chain, logistics and operations. And most companies, you know, spend a lot of money on hubs to call the patient to verify insurances, but not really to help them get on the drug, right? That's really important. So that behavioral piece is vital. And I think taking your research, taking previous research that was done, whether it's qualitative, quantitative research that's been done in a certain segment of the population, you know, loading that all. And by the way, I love Claude. I think we use Claude all the time. We prefer Claude. I don't love ChatGPT. The other one that's really helpful internally, we do this, uh, is Notebook LM. I don't know if you've used that.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

I do use it regular and familiar though.

SPEAKER_00 24:15

Yeah, you know, I don't know if pharma, you know, I suppose you can use it. I guess there's some guidelines to it. Some companies have, some companies don't, but it doesn't really hallucinate because it's your own content. And that's the beauty of it, is that you can plug everything into Notebook LM with so much content, so much, you know, everything, and it uses yours to turn out something new, right? Your own stuff. So that's really the value. But I think the the behavioral piece is also very important when you want to get initiation rates up, right, for patients. And we see again, let's let's zoom out for a second here. Yeah, and just you know, we can because we can talk about this all day long, right? I think our audience is interested in pharma marketing. Let's so let's talk about pharma marketing. Yeah, talk to me about direct to patient, okay. This this this and Trump RX, how that's shifting everything today from you know, Lily Direct, Pfizer for All. There's so many now. Talk to me about how you're seeing the evolution of direct to patient over as a as a for a pharmaceutical market.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

I mean, uh pretty kind of plain and simple for me because we're doing direct-to-consumer promotion uh or gearing that up for launch for the medical device business that I co-founded. It is an OTC, so we are very direct to consumer. Um, there's a professional piece as well, but we've been thinking, and I've been thinking a lot about well, what do we do different from the days when I was the head of smoking cessation working on Chantix, where we spent a big piece of our budget on direct-to-consumer television advertising, US, obviously, thinking from that point of view. Um, that's changed because you can go for one-to-one or one to a few versus having to do one to many. And one-to-many always had a clear ROI. We'd say it's like, you know, for every buck you spend, you might get three to three point five dollars back. I think you can get much higher multiples because they're personal and you can't even tell sometimes how they're being personalized. AI allows you, as we talked about from a messaging standpoint, but finding those people, as you alluded to, is another thing which you just couldn't do efficiently. You can find them more efficiently, you can build the personas, and then you can find where people are and get to them. I find a variety of things that make it very efficient to be able to do that. Um, I'll be able to put my money where my mouth is in six months. So we should come back and I'll tell you how good we are doing, but I am seeing other marketers. This is the change from one to many to one to few, but really high impact in scaling it over a much lower base of cost.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Yeah. That's that's powerful. So I to tandem here for a second, we're working with a client, also a medical device company, and this medical device came to us with a problem is that we've got all these doctors in the United States that we want to sell this device through, you know, so you have to get them to prescribe it. And the doctor has very little incentive, by the way. And then the patient and the device is really complicated. And the you know, the bottleneck I've seen first of all, let's let's zoom out for a second. There are hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of companies trying to sell a niche product with um um a very specific market seg, really, really specific uh market to that same doctor, and that same doctor has seven minutes to educate the patient. And so the challenge is enormous. The this company's medical device companies challenge is that they're not getting the prescriptions written because the doctor has no time to explain it. Doctor doesn't want to get it, the headaches of the phone call back asking 18 questions about how am I supposed to do this? How is this supposed to work? How's this supposed to work? How's this supposed to work? They've had a call center, they put together a call center to take the calls from a brochure. But guess what? Again, the doctor doesn't have time to explain the problem, the disease, how it affects the patient and the treatment and the long journey that the patient is going to be on for the treatment. And so these call centers are kind of like, I don't know if they're as useful as they used to be. Certainly they have a role, but I'm not sure that's happening. And really, in the specific market, what we're working with them on is really enabling that doctor to educate that patient through their video-based education system. This is not a sell to hoot, but the but the notion here is that we no longer can just spend money marketing to doctors. We really have to go to the next level. And the DTC will drive the demand, will drive the patient to the clinic, possibly, possibly, say one in three, possibly, right? But then the doctor's roadblock is the bottleneck. There, and you know, by the way, they're not making more doctors these days. No one wants to go.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

No, they're they're still right, they're still rationing them, I can assure you.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

That's it's like you go and you try to get an appointment with a dermatologist three months, you know. It's like, what is going on? So it's a serious problem, but I think there's an opportunity also in the age of AI to reach patients with you know, people with lived experiences in a meaningful way that connects the value of the product to that patient. Obviously, we have to do it through the doctor legitimately and thoughtfully, but we have to now move beyond just, hey, let me just educate the doctor.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Yeah, I you know, a couple of things. The we we've moved very much towards trust-based marketing. So I don't want to hear there's so much spam and there's so much criminality now. I mean, I bet if you pick up your phone, you probably have three messages that say, Hey, you want to meet me for dinner? And you're like, ooh, I mean, and we we've all we've grown accustomed to this, but what it's done is it's eroded that that trust. As you pointed out, there's a high degree of noise, so much clutter to break through, much more than even before. And people have figured out how to get on, you know, through text, email, phone, wherever you are. So trust-based is is vital. So, how might you use AI to build greater trust so that you get maybe not seven minutes, but two minutes? The other thing that it really calls for, and we're seeing some success with is how do you get to the way people learn and they kind of interact today. So people consume through video. And while most people will say, no, no, I read all the research and data shows that's not true. And I'm a perfect example. I still get the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal hard copy. My kids aren't sure what it is. They're like, what is that thing? And they think I'm a dinosaur. I enjoy that, I like the ink in my hands, but I don't read it as much. Why? Because I consume information through rich media and multiple other channels now. And it's the same thing with clinicians, with consumers. So we need to figure out not just strategically, but how might we use AI to be able to get there, build trust in an authentic way? And it sounds antithetical using something artificial to build something that's earnest and trustworthy, but they're not diametrically opposed. One is an enabler of the other. As a great marketer, that's your challenge. And I'm not gonna tell you how to do it yet. So right.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Well, no, tell us, do tell us. So so as we as we spend another five minutes, Dan, let's let's go, let's dive a little bit deeper into what marketers can do and to embrace AI in a thoughtful, legitimate way. We talked a little bit about some of those examples, and so one thing I want to bring up is you know, people patients were using Google a lot of times, right? To research their disease and their condition, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, so now it's all chat GPT or you know, Claude, etc. So the question becomes how does a pharmaceutical marketer is it just another Google, Dan? Is it just another way for us to use keyword optimization or to buy some keywords in Chat GPT and advertise?

SPEAKER_01 32:30

That is that is a thing that's that's happening now. You SEO, it's you know, when you do SEO for your site, you also need to be thinking about keywords and search also through chat and Claude and other AI tools. So that that is, but it's not the only thing. But keep keep going. I've yeah, that's real and that's happening, it's been monetized already.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

Yeah, and that's been monetized, but also I think one of the ways we've done that for clients is to actually ask Claude itself. It's like, hey, we're developing a pharmaceutical brand. We want these type of patients to discover our brand, and then you know, in a thoughtful way, here's kind of MLR, you know, guard guardrails here. How should we write this page? And it is so good, Dan. It's like it's so good, it'll tell you how to do it. However, you still need an eye and you know, someone like yourself or your team to help, you know, the brands uh execute on that strategy because there's things you might be missing. You may not even know what to ask for, and so that's really important.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

And yeah, as quick as you will get an answer, is as quick as you can go down the wrong path. And that is so your point about kind of a learned intermediary. Um, you know, I think of it like the the idea or the metaphor of a sherpa. Sherpas, sherpas will carry your rucksack, they'll guide you up and they'll show you the path. You still have to get up there. You have to use your legs and your own willpower to make that happen. But there's someone to guide you, and I think that is exactly the role that we play, likely that you play as well. It is important to know the paths because you you know, it's an old saying, like you, there's what's the point of blazing a path when there's one that's built already? There is value in experiencing things, but do you need to get the thorns and the bristles and the and getting pricked nonstop? No, you don't want that. So learn from the paths that have already been blazed for you. I think that is vital. Um, you know, this is very, very nuanced, but you brought this up, so I'll just build on this. Is I think that it's absolutely critical that you think about the personas that you want to be able to incorporate as you're doing your prompting. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that if you want to know how legal, medical, and regulatory are going to respond to a campaign or something's AI-based, then you need to create a persona for them. Describe them, who they are, their background, their experience. And that could be a recurring persona that you use. We do that, we did that for the FDA, actually. Um, they uh we actually put together persona very, very detailed and asked, what will they be asking for? How will they respond to us? And it was pretty darn close, and it helped us prepare our submission and responses. Same thing internally or with customers. Think personas, know who your customer is, because once you know who they are, then you can plan for them in much different ways.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'd say, you know, for one of the things that we're seeing with AI, by the way, you mentioned video for a second here, is that um there's a lot of fake videos out there, and I think it's really important from our experience we've seen is that when we use AI videos, patients didn't really love them. They they know, I mean, just no matter how good they are, human beings can tell and they kind of swipe, you know, away the content, and so it you know, really authenticity, sincerity, and trust you go back to is the most important thing patients want in terms of healthcare information.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Human beings want human interaction and human contact, and while there are these dystopian predictions of all jobs will go away in the next five years, yeah. Don't believe that. There was a guy named Thomas Malthus, a famous economist many hundreds of years ago, that said at the rate we're growing, there will be this competition where there'll be no food and no housing, and people essentially kill one another just in a in a battle for resources. And you know, and and people, when you looked at it, the logic at the time, it made really good sense. And that Malthusian dystopian notion is what people are predicting today. I think that as marketers, salespeople, clinicians, strategists, whatever your domain is, we will learn to adapt and use it, but we're gonna clamp the right controls on it because at the end of the day, it's humanity which rules the roost. As long as we don't have killer drones coming after us.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

That's Bob. But humans buy from humans, that's it. I mean, humans buy we did this something so simple on doctors, you know, Google Business Profiles. We put instead of their building, their face, and guess what? We saw we saw a rapid increase in the number of clicks to their site and to their sorry to the booking calendars. It's it's kind of simple, it's very common sense. And um, so let's let's wrap up, Dan. Let's let's give give one or two tips, uh, advice for marketers, for pharmaceutical marketers, pharmaceutical managers, leaders today that you think is really important uh in this world of AI and how AI is redefining marketing.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, the thing that I would tell and do tell everybody is you need to follow other people smarter than you who work in this domain. Follow them on YouTube, read their articles, read their research, follow them, let them blaze the path for you. You don't need to do this alone. That's the first thing. Second thing that I would strongly, strongly urge you to do experiment. Talk is cheap, doing is everything. And just doing a couple of prompts in ChatGPT doesn't make you a hero, but it does break the ice. And I would recommend starting that, learn it, practice it. And then the third thing is try to create something that has table stakes. Use it on something real and material that you do now. And I would just start by asking this what is a rule of what you do today, conventional wisdom or basic truth, something that we just don't change. I want you to try to ask, what if we applied AI to this? What would you do to upend it and turn it completely upside down? Your imagination and maybe the help of Claude or other um AI tools will help you imagine what is not being done that could be done today. If you do those three things, learn, follow, experiment, and then be curious, you will not get replaced. You will be an engineer right at the kind of the vanguard of change and what matters most.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

I love it. I love it. This is perfect, Dan. Thank you for that. I I agree with you. I would say for me, the number one, you said it is experiment. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Bring in new voices, new ideas to your organization. You know, one of the things I did um that led me to a lot of success, and you know, you did this as well, Dan, you know, in my days at Pfizer, was I brought in so many people from the outside. My boss at the time was really good at that, and he taught me to bring in new voices. And we would have a new, you know, person, new company, new vendor, new partner come in almost every couple of weeks to say, hey, what's going on? What are we missing? You know, what are we not seeing? Tell us about the world. And so at the time, I was working under you know, Ian at uh at Pfizer Europe, and we would he would have meetings all the time about what's going on. That what are we thinking about? How should we be thinking about things? And that led us to not launch a lot of projects, but a few. We launched a few projects, some worked, some didn't. But the thing is, as a marketer, as a pharmaceutical employee in any company today, you're absolutely right, Dan, that the you know, the jobs are not what they used to be. And what I mean by that is that, you know, it's it's it's you you you can be highly replaceable and it's a scary thing for people. It's a very scary thing for people. So you either, and I tell my team all the time, we have to learn and use AI and run it, or we're gonna get run over by it. And so to me, it's vital that pharmaceutical marketers and leaders experiment, experiment, bring in Dan for deliberate innovation, bring in Bob from Hoot, bring in so many others who help you think about things in such a different way because the problems are there. It's not like there's a shortage of problems, the problems are there. It's who you're bringing to the table is gonna make a difference between you and the colleague next to you, who's the one's gonna bring these people in and do it in a way that's gonna help you grow. That's the key thing, right? And so if you want to get promoted, someone who knows how to use AI, someone who knows has got their pulse on the marketplace, that place, that person is irreplaceable. And that's really important.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

I think great, great points to land on, Bob. Um, you know, last thing that I'll just say is, you know, there's a cliche, you know, the quote that's been around an African proverb if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I think that is a big thing here is that don't do it alone. There is there's a lot of tools, there's a lot of people, there are a lot of smart people. You have a specific responsibility, job role. Do what you do well, bring that outside expertise in to guide you, inspire you, think differently. Um, don't do it alone. Don't do it alone. That I think that's one of the great things. And AI is built on this notion that we're not doing things alone, we're constantly learning from other places and other sources. It just can learn a whole lot faster than we can. Um, it's the truth, it's the reality that we operate in as marketers and industry people in life sciences.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

Wonderful. Dan, where can people find you uh and to bring you in for their conversations and who should do that? Tell us.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

Yeah, I mean, delivered innovation. If you go to www.deliverinnovation.net, um, you'll find me there. You could also find me, just go go hit me up on LinkedIn. Um, very active on LinkedIn, always posting content, um, thought pieces and so on. So you can find me there. And the people who work with me, or I would say you define them as they're they're a little bit getting gray in the hair, they're experienced, they're experts, but more importantly, they're all passionate people. Like they love what they do in helping people. So thanks for for that, Bob. And uh don't be strangers wonderful.