The Use of Technology in Marketing | Gareth Shaw, Doceree

(Speech to Text)

Digital Marketing to Physicians | Gareth Shaw, Doceree

Mike Koelzer, Host: [00:00:00] Gareth, for those that haven't come across you online, introduce yourself and tell our listeners what we're talking about today.

Gareth Shaw: My name's Gareth. Um, I work for a company called, uh, Docker, and I'm, uh, the general manager for global partnerships there. And at Docker, what we are doing is we are looking to empower, , life science brands and their marketing teams to better engage healthcare professionals in, uh, you know, pharmacists, physicians, et cetera, digitally through digital media messaging and adverts, but doing that in a way where we are driving a meaningful engagement.

and we aren't carpet bombing people with a whole load of messages and advert adverts. They don't really wanna see. We're making sure everything feels more like content and is part of the experience as opposed to an ad slapped on a page.

Mike Koelzer, Host: You know, I think that physicians and pharmacists to an extent, but not as much anymore, but they're used to getting stuff brought to them on a platter in terms of they would have salespeople come to them and they would maybe give the salesperson, you know, two minutes of their time and they're used to getting something that's nailed down.

It was the job of the salesperson to nail down the information very precisely because you know, you have to put a bullseye on it because of the time constraints and so on of the physician, and it would be tempting with marketers to just. Throw the kitchen sink at physicians hoping something sticks, but they're not really used to that.

They're used to getting stuff on a silver platter, and that's where you guys probably come in and narrow that down for them. And I think the keyword is engagement.

Gareth Shaw: Yes. Uh, you, you, you hit the nail on the head with engagement. Um, you know, it's not about, you know, the way we view the world, it's not about how many ads I share, how many ad impressions, you know, it is, am I actually engaging? What's happening, um, after the outside has shown, you know, what's the behavioral or the attitudinal change?

In the audience. So, you know, we are looking past how many pretty pictures did I put on the internet or you know, how many text files did I show and how many clicks did I get? You know, the online it's all, you know, click through rate is still more popular than it should be, but you, you hit the nail on the head.

Engagement is the key. Um, the way you talked about the sales person. The sales rep, there are, there's a lot of hoo-ha out there at the moment. You're the death of the sales rep. The sales rep's going away. I don't, I don't actually think the sales rep is dead, but there are a lot less of them.

Um, there's a lot less time for, uh, HCPs to actually engage with reps. Because there are less of them and there's less time they need to be supplemented with getting the right information to the right people at the right time so it can help them basically do their job better and, you know, empower them to give the best care they can. And that's where we come in because you, you, as you, the example you were giving, marketers have sometimes been tempted to, you know, throw spaghetti at the wall and see what happens.

And I think for a long time, certainly in our industry, digital marketing was seen as almost like a box ticket exercise. So I've got my sales reps, you know, I'm doing stuff around probably a lot of event-based stuff. Um, you know, and probably sending out pamphlets. I might be doing a bit of email. Oh, and digital.

I know people spend more time on digital now. Everyone's life is more digital. What should I do? And it's like this box ticking exercise of, well, I'll go to who are the big websites in, in, you know, the are relevant and I'll, I'll buy lots of ads on those websites and. You know, the, uh, there's the old quote, I think it's, um, I think it's an Oval V quote, but it might not be, but it's quite famous.

I know 50% of my advertising doesn't work. I just don't know which 50% it is. I think, yeah, so I think that that quote, cause my background is, is from sort of, um, digital marketing across all industries. And I've been in our vertical for about five or six years now. And the technology has come so long now that you can make your marketing a lot more accountable and almost, you know, buy less ads, pay more for them because you know it's the right, the right person in the right context to give the right message.

So it's gonna resonate. And that's what we are trying to do. We're using a technology that we call where it's programmatic. Uh, technology and programmatic just means we are using programs or machines to make the decisions for us. [00:05:00] So if you think about, um, think about how financial markets used to be run.

All very people based on the phone, shouting tickets, people are phones, things like that. And now it's all algorithms and real time, and the computers do all the hard work and the trades happen in milliseconds. That technology, um, you know, has been applied in consumer advertising for 10 plus years. So we've taken that proven technology that came out.

It's been in consumer markets and we've just taken it into the life science vertical where actually if you, if you sort of think about how much data there is in terms of, well, if you've got a certain drug that you're just releasing. And it treats a certain disease state, it's very easy to be very pinpoint because you know exactly a very finite use case for what that drug or treatment does.

And then there's only a finite, there's a very finite audience that would be interested in that. So rather than, you know, thinking, well, I've got this great, great new drug, I've just published a study, my efficacy is really, really good. I'll go to the two top publications in my field and I'll buy lots of adverts there.

And I know that maybe I want to, I really talked about 40% of those people. And then, the other 60% might be interested, right? Not, so I'll take the 60% hit and if I buy enough ads, hopefully they'll remember me and someone will click and read it. Whereas what we do is we take away that, all that kind of carpet bomb style say, well, we can work out who those, you know, who those individual users are, not in a creepy way.

But you know, based on, um, their online behavior and things like that, who they are and then what they are doing at that exact point in time? You know, what content are they reading about? Because if they're reading, if they're brushing up on the particular area, you just publish your study, we can make sure that we get the ad in there and we can make sure, because it kinda, um, the whole technology, it works a bit like eBay works on auctions.

So we can make sure, cause we can say, well actually, if we know that that person is clinically the right person for this message and they're actually reading about the disease state or the treatment that this study's, we can afford to pay, you know, several multiples of what the sort of carpet bomber, um, blanket marketer would be paying because they're factoring all their wastage.

So we would pay, you know, two, three times more. Win that ad, but then would get that result. And one of the, one of the killer, killer use cases we've seen in the US is around, um, coupons, for instance. So, it's probably more of a physician than a pharmacist one, but I think it also really brings to life what we're doing.

So we work with lots of different websites, so journals, medical associations, um, peer to peer networking, but we also work with, uh, specific platforms. So e-prescribing apps, uh, or electronic health records. So imagine we have a physician, they've logged into an electronic health record. Patients come in. Um, we are able to, so we don't, we are not, no HIPAA stuff.

Well, we're not, we're not taking any patient, um, data. But when they come in, we go, oh, they've got a patient and it's maybe a male aged 40 to 49. They're insured with whoever their insurance provider is. And then you can order some tests, make a diagnosis, prescribe something, because everything's code based.

We can see what those codes are. Now if for instance, they've certainly prescribed a drug where it's not covered, um, by that health insurer, but there's a coupon that the pharma company has published and that money's spent and it's out there and it just sat somewhere in office in paper form and no one ever links the two things together, we can suddenly surface at that time.

So the physician goes, oh, cool, there, there's a coupon. So you think the physician is really happy because they can give the prescription with the coupon so they know, well, I'm prescribing what I think is gonna get the best outcome. If I give them the coupon, I've got a lot more chance of them filling the prescription, taking it as prescribed.

I don't have to worry about people taking half doses or, or trying to save costs. The patient's really happy because it's saving them money. And then the farmer company's really happy because, you know, they've printed those, that coupon money is there to be spent, you know, they don't want it to just sit there and never get spent because, you know, they wanna drive their sales.

So that's one of the, the simple sort of use cases to really understand how our technology can work because we're able to take those different data signals and ping it together. And then, so actually in this moment in time, we can do that because in traditional advertising, you know, you pay, you know, you pay on what's called a cpm, so you pay [00:10:00] a certain amount of dollars for a thousand, a thousand avenues.

And, you know, there's, and the, the attributes can be counted in hundreds of thousands of millions in some cases. So if you are just trying to spread it thick yeah, you'll, you'll, you'll get your message out there. But there's so much wastage. So I find the good mantra for what, what we do when talking to sort of Marcus is don't look at our technology and think because it's an auction, it's a way of buying.

Buying media cheaply. Think about it in more of a way. It's about driving better engagement. You know, getting the right message, the right person, and I almost think I want to buy less ads and pay more for them because I've got more insight into what's gonna happen and what that behavioral change will be. And that's good for the marketer cause it's good for, you know, their return on ad spend and return on investment.

But it's also good for the audience because it means we get away from those annoying, annoying ads. And, you know, for putting my consumer hat on, you know, I've been in the industry a long time. I'm quite cynical and I'm, I'm definitely banner blind, you know, if I'm on Instagram for instance, you know, and there's tons of ads on Instagram now and I'll see the bad ones and I'll just flick past them.

I won't even register what they are cuz they don't feel like the content experience. But I, I will click on Instagram ads and I'll, I bought things through Instagram ads, but there, it's when the ads. Feels more like content. So when there's a brand that's talking about something that I'm, you know, cause all that data on what I'm interested in is on there when the brand has done their homework and put me in as the right target audience and surfaces it, not just, you know, you're, I'm in the market for a car insurance and a holiday and kind of solve, let's try it for 30 days and you might bite one, but what am I doing?

And get really precise with not just who I am, but what am I doing when's the right time to show me that message. I'll think, oh, that's really cool. And it stops being an advert and it becomes more of a prompt

to, to make me do something. And we're getting, we've been getting more and more into um, looking at what is the behavioral attitudinal effect of advertising.

Cause the beauty of our sort of, you know, the machines and the programs that power what we do. And we've got a, a really sort of, Um, technology, we call it, we call itn, but basically it's a, it's a clever data management platform that sits, you know what, we are a marketplace. We have demand on one side, which is marketers, advertisers, and then we have suppliers on the other.

In fact, the websites and platforms where, where your listeners might go and do their job. So we are trying to connect those two and we have the technology. If we get that bit in the middle and we do a really good job of, well, who you know, is it the right person? Is it the right context, the right time?

But then we can also start linking in, well, what happened then? So we do, um, a lot of attitudinal behavioral surveys or we'll look at, um, in the physician case we might look at prescribing data and anonymized prescribing data and things like that. But we link it all back. You can create a real time feedback loop.

So you almost get that this kind of like compounding network effect of the more you run and the more information and data you feed the machine, the better the machine gets

and. When you do it right, it's not just better for the marketer, it's better for the target audience. Well, because it stops being about, Hey, look at this, look at this.

And it's like, here's a prompt. Oh, we've just released this. And it's like, it feels more like that extension of what you're already doing.

Mike Koelzer, Host: I know that. Hipaa, compliant and I'm guessing that you can see stuff about the patient as long as you don't know who it is. 

Gareth Shaw: My industry is full of acronyms. The acronyms, uh, pii, are so personally identified. We have no PII on the patient, all we get fed is, uh, you know, physician 1, 2, 3, just prescribed, um, treatment X, Y, Z. So,

Mike Koelzer, Host: You don't get the age and the BMI and that kind of stuff, even though you don't know who the patient

Gareth Shaw: might get, uh, my age, but no, no, we don't go too, we deliberately don't go too granular on the patient because of hipaa. We 

we're HIPAA compliant, but we are very much more focused on it, it's almost like B2B marketing. So who is the healthcare professional? You don't need to know who the patient is or you don't, and you don't need any sensitive health information.

We're, we're a global business, so obviously we're in the US we hipaa. Um, you know, where I am, it's even more strict. You know, you have things like gdpr, so we are very careful around, you know, we don't know. We deliberately avoid knowing anything about the patient. But we are very good at understanding the situation of, well, who is the healthcare professional [00:15:00] and what are they doing?

They could be diagnosing and treating someone with arthritis, but we've got no idea who that person with that arthritis might be.

Mike Koelzer, Host: You don't know from their side, their income or their buying habits or whether they like brand names or generics or whether their husband shops or, or the wife shops.

You don't know any of that from their side. You're just looking at the top data of the doctor and a little bit of stuff from the patient, but nothing on their end. Even if it's clean, even if you don't know who it is.

Gareth Shaw: We are staying away from that because you have to be so careful you get into it. But also there's a big element of, you know, as I was saying before, for an industry that is so good at using big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning for, you know, the advancement of treatment and r and d and then you look at, you know, so you think about, uh, take just the pharma vertical site, you got a big r and d budget, and then you've got a big sales and marketing budget and how much r and d embrace big data, ai, machine learning, all that cool stuff.

And then you look at what the contrast is to what they do on the marketing side. And it's such a gulf, so we don't need to go that deep yet because there's so much low hanging fruit

Mike Koelzer, Host: The r and d is, doing all of the market research in order to find out what drug they want. But The sales haven't caught up in terms of technology, is that what you're saying?

Gareth Shaw: Yeah, definitely.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Is that? Because salespeople and marketers have always felt sort of, uh, you know, artsy kind of the feel good side of things.

It would seem that if a ton of money is being spent, it would seem that r and d to make sure they have enough of a populace that has that disease and all that stuff. It seems like the sales side would use the same unless it's more artsy.

Gareth Shaw: Well, and I'm probably doing them a bit of a disservice. So they definitely, uh, I think they definitely you to use technology and link everything together, but I think there's an element of, you know, it's very reliant on, on the sort of the rep or the salesperson 

model. And there's an element of, you know, that model, you know, it worked pretty good for a long time, but, uh, there was sort of a resistance to change.

And 

If you look at them, the technology that we use is about 10, give or take 10 years old in the consumer world. And that's great for us because we can look at all the rookie mistakes that got made early on, uh, and, and avoid them as we bring it in. We've got something that we know and it works.

It's good enough.

It's good. Is it great? Probably not. But you know, it does, you know, I spend a dollar, I know I can get X dollars back, but I might not be able to, you know, know exactly which dollar powers, which and that that's the, the main sort of difference. So I think because it's regulated, I think that there was a lot of risk around what was going on digitally,

and I think that drove this golf.

So to say that the sales and marketers don't use technology, I think, I think would probably be unfair because I know the reps have access to, you know, lots of cool stuff and they all have iPads. It's all linked together. But when it comes to how they were leveraging digital advertising, they really been missing a trick because like I say, they've been going with the odd, you think about, um, you know, how you, how you would buy ads in magazines, you know, so, oh, I'm a car brand.

Um, you know, I'm gonna put my, I'm a luxury car brand. I know that people. We read this magazine in luxury cars, but hot, you know, the vast majority of the readers can't see my car, but I'll still stick the ad in there. And I think they still go with that sort of blanket approach of like, yeah, I'll, I'll take everything.

And they're just, it's the way they take advantage of all the data that just this attack drives on digital life. You think about, um, I was talking to someone the other day and it was about what are the challenges? So what are, yeah, what are the problems or challenges that we're, we are looking to solve?

And if it thinks about the pharmacist, uh, digital journeys it works. So, you know, get up in the morning, you might check, you know, your favorite sports website, but then you might check your work email, your personal email. Then you might look at some, you know, I dunno if there's like e-prescribing apps, but there'll be various platforms or websites that you are using throughout the day to help with.

Your professional life, and they're all siloed and fragmented because they're all individual platforms that do an [00:20:00] indivi job. our technology, basically we, we are able to connect all those different silos into what is the digital journey of that, of that professional. Um, and that becomes very useful to a brand , 

Mike Koelzer, Host: You're somehow picking up that this, physician or someone is on LinkedIn for a bit and on, you know, Google News or some, you're getting that information

Gareth Shaw: We specialize in only a professional environment. So we very deliberately don't look at LinkedIn and, and Google. There are a lot, there are some other companies out there that do it the other way around and they say, we can find physics. Wherever they are on the internet.

And if I find them on, uh, Google News or I find them on espn.com, they're much cheaper to buy because I, I buy them as a consumer. But then if you are trying to educate them on the latest clinical study, they're not in that frame of mind. So 

So we've built a network of. Various professional sites and platforms. So online medical journals, medical education, medical association. So we built up, and the way advertising used to work would be all these different. You've got some of the big journals, they're massive but actually when you want to, as a marketer, want to, you're not interested in that huge portfolio.

You're interested in one or two things. But then you'd also be interested in, well, what are the people who read that journal? You know, do they go on 20 peer to peer networking sites and do they, you know, do, are they asking questions to their peers? But, oh, how did you count with this? Or what do you do?

And then, you know, are they using e-prescribing apps or, you know, are they doing any telemedicine consults? Because all these different digital touchpoints throughout the day all existed as different silos. So for the marketer, To be able to do effective digital marketing, then really if they wanted reach, they'd have to go to the big players, give them a, a big chunk of, of, of marketing budget and then overexpose, you know,

that little bit.

And I think medical education's a good one because it may be, you know, you spend two or three days in a given week, you go quite hard on a medical education site. But then you might not go back there. You might not go back for another six weeks, but you are going to other places and doing other things.

So by building out our network of all these different digital touchpoint, we are able to take these previous, uh, unconnected sort of siloed digital experiences and weave them together into this sort of patchwork of, well, what is a healthcare professional's digital journey, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Do you have agreements or something with these other peer to peer things where you can get that information?

Gareth Shaw: So we don't own any, um, client facing stuff. Um, we work, so our network, as I term it, is we go to all the different app owners or website owners and we, we, we basically did deals with them so that we can then connect. And then we try to do it whenever we are able to identify someone, so they may have logged in. And a new prescribing app. So we're able to say, ah, cool. We know, you know, we know where they're based or 

Yeah. 

But then we're able to, in a sort of, um, uh, data compliant manner, then match that person to, oh, well then I can see them move through, um, my network.

And that's, that's the real power of what we do.

Cuz when we're able to build that, uh, graph or map of, but, and then, you know, it's not, we're not being creepy, we're not stalking people around the internet like that. But you build up that picture of, well what is the digital journey? And because we are then as say, building this sort of almost network effect of the more messages we show and then we are learning, well, when we show this message to this, you know, this cohort of, of people in this environment, they respond better than this environment or the creative mess and we're able to feed the machine.

So it may be that. Time of day of when you show a message can have a big impact because people come in the morning, it might be head down because in the morning I need to clear the deck and then I start, um, you know, but I, there's an hour of time when I do my, and so you start to pick up on what, what is that sort of sweet spot of when, cause if you show it in the morning versus the afternoon mall or the other way around, or someone might be on their mobile phone versus their desktop.

At their desktop, they might be at work and their head's down, I'm just gonna get this done to get onto the next thing my day. Whereas if they might be on their mobile phone and their commute later. So you take all those different data, you know, we take all those different data points, feed them into an intelligence. You know, it's not, you know, we're not setting these, you know, one rule, you know, we're not, the carpet [00:25:00] one rule. You start, you know, instead of trading ads on packs of a thousand stacked, 

you know, a thousand on, a thousand thousand, you know, it's individual one, one to one sort of for the data that sits behind it.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Is your agreement with the other software companies, is that live in terms of, you could say that when people leave the peer-to-peer network, they're chatting, they always go here to verify what somebody said. Are you able to give them an ad when they come from somewhere like real time?

Or is it more of, um, a generalized feeling?

Gareth Shaw: It's not quite as granular as your, of being able to, you know, go up from here to here. Um, sometimes it might be, but it's more of a case of if it's a particular, like a Journals a good example. So Medical Journal, they've published an article that 's gonna sit there for, you know, it's almost gonna be evergreen.

Um, you know, so once we've read that page, we contextualize it. We know what that page is about. So then when we, and if we know. We've got everyone in this graph or map. So as someone comes in, if we know actually they're, they're really interested in

this and they're reading about this as well, then we go, that's, you know, two indicators bid high.

So we got different data pockets and then it's how we layer them together. So it's, you know, what do, you've got your audience, you've got your kind of page contact, you've got your time of day, you've got what, what is the creative message? You know, a lot of, a lot of time you can do creative testing. So you might say, well, I've got this creative message and this creative message is a test for them.

And it might be one just as better, but it may be that one works better on a networking site, whereas one works better in an app and all this different stuff.

Mike Koelzer, Host: When I had started on LinkedIn, let's say, you know, 10, 12 years ago or whatever, and just setting up some groups and things for the local physicians and pharmacists and things, it always seems like. Physicians back in the day on LinkedIn were very few and far between. And also attorneys.

And I asked somebody one time, I was thinking, why is it with those two groups? And someone said, well, they're busy. And I thought, yeah, they're busy. And I thought, well, with attorneys, they probably don't wanna, they're afraid they're gonna give away free advice and doctors maybe this or that.

When you see physicians what is their feeling in general in terms of being an early adopter of anything? Are they usually late adopters of stuff because they're used to, hands on, manipulation of the body and things like that, and like this technology, I'm not gonna deal with that.

Or they try to stay off social for many different reasons. Do you see any trends with physicians?

Gareth Shaw: It's a bit of a mixed bag. I mean, if I was making sweeping sort of generalizations, um, older, older, uh, physicians are generally a little bit less tech savvy.

Not to say that all old people are, but there is, there is a little bit of gold. You know, you look at some of the data with, you know, digital engagement and that there's a sort of sweet spot from. Um, you know, mid to late thirties into early forties and sort of down very sort of tech savvy, you know, look at a lot of sort of the surveys like, you know, industry surveys online, you know, how do you want to be engaged with, oh, I, like, I wanna be engaged with digital. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: my show the main curve on top is 35 to 45 year old males. That's the audience.

Gareth Shaw: Yeah. So, so kinda similar to that, um, what I find is we do a, we did a lot of, so I'm sort of based, based out in Europe and we've been doing a lot in Europe. It's very sort of website website based

I, to bore you with the legalities. But, um, we can only show any promotional content around prescription drugs to HCPs and HCP environments.

So the way to do that is to go to the HCP login. Um, but they're also, we have EHRs, we have e-prescribed, there's all these great little, and they're sort of, well the, the startup world for health tech has just gone crazy. Um, and it's a lot of the people I meet when I go to different conferences, they are all, well, not all, but a lot of them are sort of younger, sort of my age and down.

I'm 41, so a little bit older and, and, but they've been doctors or, or some sort of practitioner and they've just been fed up with the status quo. So they've been like, I'm gonna build a better mousetrap. And then when we start talking to 'em about, oh well we are all about making sure we get the right message to the [00:30:00] right person at the right time so they can be better at their job and give out better care. And this is how we do it. And they're always super interested and it's not always the right time. Cause they're usually, you know, got this core staff. So I need to. Their challenge is they need to get it out there. They need to get, you know, whether it's, um, an NHS truck, they need to get someone to buy it, to get some people using the platform.

But then when they've got that kind of critical mass, then they're like, oh, this is, this is quite interesting. So, um, to make sweeping general statements. Yeah, sort of mid forties and, and down, or a lot more tech savvy. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Some industries like real estate realtors, All the old farts are doing everything, they're sending out postcards and doing online stuff, and that, I think that's maybe more who that kind of person is who's in real estate.

You know, they're maybe more outgoing than the average and they know they need those connections and they have to stay part of the household name and things like that. So probably certain industries tend to maybe shift different age sets, in a general sense, I guess.

Gareth Shaw: Yeah. No, I, I think, and I think it's what drives what we do. Consumption. So if you've got people who are like, no, I, I, I still describe, you know, my, my journal, my medical journals dropped you in my letter box. And I, you know, and I, I, I went with my own habits. I went, can, I stopped all my magazine subscriptions and I started off again.

Cause I can't, I can't quite like, but don't have as many now. Um, but you know that it's all about the consumption. So if they're heavy consumers, digital content, that's where we'll see them the most. But the beauty of what we do, and one of the things that sort of makes us stand out and be a little bit more unique is we are not just looking at, you know, your, your sort of websites.

We are looking at the platforms as well. So e-prescribing, telemedicine, um, electronic health records because we looked at how much time does a physician spend in front of a screen 

per day doing their job. And it is a lot.

 And then who are the partners we can bring into our network that are owning that digital experience as part of that digital journey? And is the synergy with, Hey, your website, you like, add revenue, we can help you be better at it. And, you know, we'll do a deal. But, um, you know, if it's an electronic health record, that example I gave earlier about, about the coupon,

We all know the coupons exist.

We all know that like 80, 80% plus never gets spent. You know, we, we firmly believe that that is a, an issue around location based, that they get sent to the office and then they sit in an 

office. And the physicians in a different room, given that, and the two things don't, you know, just physically don't meet, there's not enough time to go and find them.

And, but if we can surface that, that EHR is like, actually that's gonna make me, I'm gonna, that's gonna make my HR stand out against my competitors. So that's gonna mean I can sell to more hospital groups because what hospital group wouldn't want coupons to be surfaced automatically? Um, so it's about finding who's controlling that sort of screen time and then what, how can, what we are doing and what they're doing and fundamentally what, what the healthcare professional is doing on the other side of that screen.

How can we link that together to make it better for everyone? Drive that synergy because we don't just want to be a company that throws out lots of adverts. We wanna drive engagement cuz that's how you know we're a start. We wanna be a billion dollar unicorn. And we firmly believe that that engagement, that's been the missing piece for, for digital marketing because the rep, you know, if the rep went into the office, you got engagement, you had a conversation.

But as that gets harder and harder to do, and with Covid completely locking that down for, you know, however long in various different countries, dig, you have to turn to digital. And I think now the genie's out the bottle, it was well-reputed and it was all digital. And now the buzzword is hybrid: the smart people they'll hybridize it, but they'll make it click together.

Mike Koelzer, Host: What is the most effective metric in your mind? What's the most powerful thing you could sell to a company and say, look here's this metric and it's a huge metric because we can, you know, prove this.

What would it 

be? 

Gareth Shaw: So classic you run a small test control group and then you look at, well, what would their prescribing habits be before the campaign started and then what happened after?

So how many new scripts, how many total scripts, how many new to brand scripts? And you know, and then you can break it down even further. So if someone saw the message five [00:35:00] times versus 10 times, you know, what was the impact?

And, you know, can you send a message, so did you take, you know, oh, I showed them this and then I showed, you know, and there's like an ED as I educated them or they went through. Cycles. Um, yeah, so script, script lift is massive in the states. Um, outside the us. Uh, script data does exist in different markets, uh, but um, probably it'd be behavioral attitudinal change. So we'd look at, um, survey based. So just how we could, just, how we can target anyone, you know, within our network with a particular message from, from a brand.

We can also target them with a message from us so we could, you know, send them a survey. This is, um, probably the easiest way to understand this is if you've ever spent any time on YouTube, you know, YouTube showed their ads, and then periodically you'll get that survey, which like, oh, which brands do you remember seeing an ad for?

And if you, and then they're not very long, they, you like four or five questions. But it's, do you remember, what were they talking about? Are you now more likely to, you know, buy that brand or prescribe that brand? Or what is your attitude towards that brand? Um, so that kind of attitudinal behavioral change.

Um, so in the absence of script data, um, it would be, is my message resonating with the audience? I had a manager once and he was really, he basically said, whenever you have a meeting, there might just be one thing you want them to remember. And it, really, that is the killer metric. So whatever. My company, you know, I'll want one thing to live inside that audience's head,

And if I can, someone can show me a metric that's statistically relevant and all the, that's like, is that thing either that behavior, so in scripts, so are, are the scripts coming in physically?

Are they being written and being fulfilled? Or am I getting, you know, am I now living in that person's kind of, um, thought back, you know, are they, are they now aware of before I did this, they didn't know X, now they know X and I can prove it. And then I'm seeing that in my bottom line.

Mike Koelzer, Host: If you had all the money in the world to do it. Are there any metrics that could be almost instantaneous that really meant something? The script volume, of course, is the most important thing. I'm just trying to play in my head if there could be anything that would be ever better than that.

Gareth Shaw: Theoretically the answer is, is yes. The script data, because of the nature, we actually pull it in in real time.

So traditionally, if you run a campaign, you know, you might, well I'm gonna run a three month campaign. I'm then going to pull it all together, take a couple of months to reconcile it, get all my data, then my script data will come and maybe three months out after the fact, you can look at, well, what happened?

We pull it all in in real time so

We couldn't do it in 60 minutes. But once you'd been running a campaign for about a week, you'd be able to start seeing. So say you're running that three month campaign in.

Well, probably in a few days, but once you week in, you'd probably start to be seeing enough data that then the machine or, and also you can, you can sort of push the machine in different directions with hands on keyboard as well.

You'd have enough data, you'd be able to start feeding that, feeding that in. Um, the other part of your question though, so that that's how it works Now, the bit that is exciting if it's done in the right way and this isn't, uh, you know, we, we, we, I'm, this isn't me sort, I'm not talking about roadmaps, is me just with my Gareth Hatha, not my

Dock Hat is the amount of, um, oh, I've been, I've been on the, you know, the, the smart watch wearable thing for a few years now, and the amount of data, this thing's picking up, I can nerd out on it all day, you know, on my vitals and things like that.

And,

What's happening just with nhs and I think America's probably even what America is, is a, he like being able to carry your health records around , but also if you are getting any kind of treatment, being able to log, starting to log that data or getting the reminders of like, when should I take my tablet the data is gonna exist because technology is giving, adding value.

You know, I've been rehabbing a shoulder injury and my physio sent me to download this app. My rehab exercise is all in there. I fill it out. I say how much it hurts for each exercise on which day, and then I get pretty little graphs that I assume my physio's gonna look at. And when I missed a couple of, I didn't do it last night, I'm probably gonna get a slap on the wrist.

 As technology is used to solve more and more problems, just make our lives easier,[00:40:00] 

That's gonna generate a lot more data. And if as an industry, we are respectful of how we use that data and we harness it in a way where then it adds value back to, you know, the end user, the brand, um, and the service provider that's that conduit between the two.

You know, it's very, very powerful.

Remember the Tom Cruise, um, film minority report. When he is, he's walking through the shopping mall and everyone, it's just everywhere reading his eyes. And like every wall is like an advert talking to him and like a serial box talking to him.

We don't ever want to get to that minority report level, but there's a way, a much more socially responsible way of doing it where it just, it, it makes everyone's life better 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Some people say I don't want the internet to know this about me. I want my privacy and this and that. It's like part of it because I own my own business, I guess. I wouldn't want my boss looking at me. But a lot of stuff, it's like, yeah, watch me watch what I'm doing and use AI to, you know, tell me this and tell me that.

 I have a new website for my show and I didn't ask for it, but on there is a little box that says I am not a robot. That box, they know that the average person, especially an old fart like me, is gonna wiggle the mouse around and then maybe go up and do it.

They can tell a human's doing it. And when you talk about hovering and things like that, what methods are there from computer companies ? , consumers don't even know you're watching, like hovering and eyeball movement and things like that.

And then here's the big question. Are these apps like Amazon and Google, are they listening to us all the time? Because we all have stories about, you know, I talked about a dog collar or something, and pretty soon I'm seeing you know, dog collar. So, what are some of the tricks of the trade that people say, oh, I didn't know they could see me hovering and then, 

Gareth Shaw: yeah with the, with the hovering, so if you are aware, so if you own the. You can, yeah, that's your website. So you can look at where people are mounting over and scroll, scroll velocity is an interesting one

So say you're reading an article,

quickly you scroll.

If your scroll velocity is really quick, 

you haven't read it, if I'm reading an article, you know, quick readers will be a little bit quicker and slower, but that's how quickly people scroll through a written article. That's really interesting. On the advent stuff, you can only tell it someone's hovering over your advert.

You can't tell what they're, if they're, they're not on the advert. And then with the eyeball tracking, that's, uh, usually panel based, so that's people who know their eyeballs are being tracked. So it's not your webcam turning on and looking at the world. Um, Yeah, just there are, there are a lot of companies that, I'm sure everyone's got a story about how, now, you look, you, you, you bought a pair of shoes or a tennis racket online and then for the next month you got stalked with the advert.

That's a tactical retargeting. And I think that was one of the things that the industry as a whole sort of did wrong. Cuz what it, you, you have the sort of sales funnel, right? You have to drive awareness right down to driving the sale. I think one of the things when I was saying about how we get to avoid some of the mistakes we are coming to the party a bit late, is everyone found, well, I'll do awareness and then I might, um, do some more targeting stuff and you know, go down to all the, and then the thing I know I'll get the most sales is people who've put something in the basket on my website, but haven't checked out yet.

Or they just, or they put it in the basket and they might have checked out, I haven't built the logic to work that out, and I'll just throw ads at them and they'd always get the most sales off that book. And the chances are you don't need to show them, they've probably already made their mind up.

They've done the research. They're just waiting for that, that five minutes when they're shouting and or, you to, just to put it through. So there is an element of that, um, you know, Alexa and Amazon and, and, um, you know, Facebook, Instagram, they are all very good at picking up on, you know, what you're saying and 

Mike Koelzer, Host: They are listening. 

Gareth Shaw: It's been a while since I've looked at their Ts and Cs, so don't quote me up.

I think somewhere in the Ts and Cs for meta, which is Facebook, WhatsApp, and, well actually not, maybe not WhatsApp cause I've spoken, but they are listening. I know Google, um, will [00:45:00] look at text based stuff out of emails. I don't think they read your emails. I think they look at different keywords.

The internet isn't free, you need to be comfortable with that. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: You are not the customer. You 

Gareth Shaw: Yeah 

In some instances. Yes. And it, you have to be comfortable with that.

For instance, um, go on YouTube, right. Um, Uh, I dunno what YouTube premium costs, they're always prompting me sign for, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: 12

Gareth Shaw: Yeah, 12 bucks. It's like, take you off month three, but then sign up your credit card. And it's like, I'll just, I'll just the ads and I'll skip through them and then the ones they want, let me skip.

I'll just watch. Cause you know, I don't wanna, I don't see the value exchange in the 12 bucks. Um, but then other, other things I do, um, you know, the big, big story recently has been Netflix. You know, they're gonna start doing advertising, so there's gonna be a cheaper, cheaper Netflix, so they're gonna run out.

Um, and it, it's that, it's that value. I think it used to be a lot creepier than it is now. I think a lot of brands, especially the big guys, have realized that actually we can't, we can't take liberties with people's data. You know, we have to respect it, but at the same time, it's all in their fees and fees.

Um, All the big guys. Now if you, you can probably within five minutes, if you know what you're looking for, find out where all the data they keep on you is, and then tick, which tick what you're happy with and what you're not. But, uh, you have to sort of be comfortable with like, like you say, like that you, you are a certain extent in the product.

There's a good stat with Apple and Google, like with the iPhone and um, the Android phones. And I think they were saying that, uh, these numbers are probably a little bit made up, but I think Google were pulling off 2000 data points from Android phones a day, whereas Apple were pulling off 200.

So it's about 10 x more data. But then Google phones are a lot cheaper. . 

Apple's done a really good job. They sell privacy as a feature. It's like, Hey, we're a luxury brand.

You look at all the premises, it's like, oh, is that a human right? Is it a luxury You could, you can argue that, but it's a right.

Mike Koelzer, Host: Someone had told me one time, they said, no, and I could see this, but they said, no, the phones aren't listening. You said they are, and I believe they are, but they said the phones aren't listening, they're able to tell so much stuff in your searching that you don't realize. Let's say you looked up batteries, and then you looked up, camping and you looked up something else. Those computers are so smart, they can tell that this person is gonna look at, you know, Ritz crackers and cheddar cheese the next day or something.

You know, they just know they have so many points. 

 That's exactly what your program is doing. Because if I'm going camping, I want Ritz crackers to show me their new thing. And I wanna see what cheeses are out there.

Cause I'm gonna have cheese and crackers. I don't consider that a bad ad. And that's what your business is doing, making it so important that people don't see it as an ad. They see it as something they're welcoming.

Gareth Shaw: Yeah, exactly that, you know. I poked my phone a little bit at sort of Facebook cuz it's easy cuz they've got so many, so many public instances when they've done things wrong. But, you know, they're not, I don't think they're, well you can think what you think about their management. I don't think they're, they're trying to do anything blatantly wrong now after they can, I think they got their hand in the cookie not so much.

I think they were a little bit more naive as to what might have been happening on their platform. Uh, but you know, like Amazon is really interesting because Amazon, their sites, their apps are amazing. You know, Alexa makes everyone's life so much easier. But they get all that data and they are one of, you know, in terms of consumer brands, everyone is working with the Amazon platform in the background, but they don't show any ads on Amazon.

They take that data and they use it across the rest of the internet. But for your example, if you just bought a lot of camping gear, You're probably gonna want the cracker ads to remind you to get the stuff to make smaller before you go. And you'd be like, yeah, I, I need to pop down to the store and get that.

And, you know, it's that prompt and you know, the dates there and it's the, the smart savvy marketers that work with the, you know, the smart savvy, um, platforms to make those campaigns and all the sort smart people who are thinking about the long game now are like, I need to, you know, and this sounds really corny, but I need to use this data and this powerful for [00:50:00] the good of the end consumer.

I can't just be chasing my bottom line, you know, in, in, I think about in Europe now, cuz we have gdpr. Everyone, everyone, you have to consent for everything. So if brand, it used to be really easy, you know, you could. You know, get a hold of my data, find who I am and target that. Now you need me to consent to that.

Uh, but if you are good, if you're a good brand and I trust you, and you know, I get something by giving you my consent to hold my data, I'm getting something that's valuable back, I'll give it. But, um, you know, I I, I'm not, not throwing stones at any brands, but McDonald's, for every time I go to McDonald's, now they have these like automated take.

My kids love

Meals. So I take, I take 'em in on a, on a Saturday for a tree and they have these automated screens. Um, and you put your order in and it's constantly, would you like to log in? No. No, no. I'll check out as a guest. Cause I just wanna buy two happy

but there's no, and I'm sure if I was eating a lot more McDonald's, there'd be some sort of loyalty program.

But there's not enough value. McDonald's doesn't give enough value for surrendering that data.

that's what you've gotta get. Right? And that's where I think as we, particularly for our industry, because you know, you just have to, you've gotta stay up to the thing, you've gotta stay up to date, you know, to remain qualified.

So the appetite to get the information is there.

The digital vehicles to provide the information are there. And if used in the right way, it can be win-win for, you know, the, the, the brands that want to disseminate the information, um, the platforms that the information's going across, and fundamentally the end user.

And then by giving that end user the healthcare professional that information, it benefits the patient who really is, you know, that's what we're all, we're all driving for. So it's about making sure that that value exchange and transparency is there.

Mike Koelzer, Host: It's interesting you say McDonald's because that's an example of. Uh, if you don't do things right, you can come across that your technology is worse we've got this, McDonald's and I did the part where you pull up into the, they've got these parking spots, one, two, and three, and you put your order in and you say you're in spot two or something like that.

And they're supposed to bring your food out without you going through the drive through. And I've had enough times where they forgot about me, where the kid says, you know, pull up and we'll be out there. And they never do it. So I go up and I say I'm number two. I sat there. 15 minutes.

There's about 20 cars in the drive through. I know there's no way in hell I'm gonna get my food. I took off and wasted my four bucks or something like that. I'm not gonna sit there. But that's an example of a company that maybe they're forward thinking, but in a hurry Between your story and my story and other ones like that, it's like, no one's gonna trust it.

And once you've lost that trust,

 You don't want to give your name and then this and that you gotta do it. Right.

Gareth Shaw: a hundred percent. you've got, what is it? Trust. Trust takes a long time to learn. You go in a second. And as a brand or a marketer, you can't think of it as a box ticking exercise. You can't think, well, I need data or I need to, it can't be a box. It's gotta be, forget about, I need this data, or I need, think about, you know, into your question earlier about the metrics.

What, what do you want to happen? What do you want to do? You know, think about that, and then what is the best way to make that happen? And look at all the tools that are available to you. And if you are not, if you are not a, um, if you're not well versed in it, look for a partner that is, you know, that could be an agency, it could be a platform like us, but ask the, ask the right.

Learn what the right questions to ask

To find the right person who can help you do what you wanna do. don't get weighed down thinking, we, I, I need a database with this many pharmacists in it, because that's really gonna solve my marketing problems. It might be for certain problems that you know, that there's a very real use case where that is the.

But specifically, what, what do you wanna do? How do you wanna do it? Because you'll need to, you know, like, uh, uh, is it ccpa, the California thing? I think that's going to another state now, that g is at that vault. It's only going to be more, let's make your privacy a thing. We all gotta think about that value exchange.

If you've got a good value exchange, you're off to the races. But if you are just rushing through and tickling, trying to tick box, do tick box [00:55:00] exercises, think those guys are doing that, I need to do that too, and you're not thinking about it. You, you know, you're gonna run into trouble because the, the, the audience or the

they won't do it as if we become more digitally savvy.

Mike Koelzer, Host: What's the biggest hurdle that you might hear if you're a salesperson or a marketer of your company?

What's the biggest argument against your company?

Gareth Shaw: If you said I could have a magic wand or a genie and I could make one wish, it'd be like, I'd wanna just educate the market on the status quo might work just well enough, but there's a better way of doing things.

And it's not just better for you, it's better for the end users. flipping it around too. The, sort of the end audience side. It's a kind of tricky one because you kind of, almost along for the ride a little bit, you've got where you go to get your informa, you know, the journals you might go to, the medical education.

You've got places where you go. Um, what I would really say is if I was anyone, like go to the partners or the, the use the resources where you feel like you get the most value and wherever you are using a resource where there's value, but something's annoying, you try and find some sort of feedback loop to, to put that in and, you know, If you do find something that's getting you down, share it with your colleagues and, you know, try and cause that, that is sort of almost voting with your feet.

Um, you know, if certain platforms or apps or websites are given a crappy experience, um, and you can get that information elsewhere, go to the place that does it. You know, because that's what will drive change. If you put up with a subpar experience,

you can't ever expect that experience to change.

Now the exception is there's only one game in

town, obviously, because, but then anywhere there's one game in town, there'll be the nature of the environment out. There'll be an upstart

Mike Koelzer, Host: I've talked to some of my guests about blockchain, and they said how valuable that is for things like research, because if somebody puts information of me , in a research, findings, by the time it gets to this other company, they wanna make sure that my weight hasn't changed, by an error, someone put the wrong decimal in or things like that.

It adds a lot of substance and confidence to that. Your stuff though is almost the opposite cuz it's HIPAA compliant, so you don't really wanna nail down those things. But is there a place for the blockchain in, this kind of a thought process anywhere?

Gareth Shaw: Yeah. So yes, blockchain is super interesting and it kinda, it went through a real buzzword patch and it died down. I think that the premise of blockchain, well, almost any industry where you are through digital handshakes, um, doing stuff with data could benefit from a, the right application of blockchain.

Say we get to this utopian future where everyone is very savvy about, you know, I have, I, you know, I have data about me online and how I, I use digitally. I'm going to consent to that data in those. You can, yes, you can know that I'm a doctor, but no, you can't know my name or what.

So as people get more data savvy, companies will pop up, or the existing companies will start to use blockchain to keep an accurate record of what can and can't be used, um, in the, no one's really done it at scale in a really good way at the moment. But the cool thing for sort of just digital advertising in general is making sure, you know, getting rid of, um, you know, ad fraud, which, you know, I, it's not a very big problem in, in our very sort of niche specialized industry, but, you know, it's billions and billions of dollars, you know, like fund, you know, like serious career sort of criminal stuff build these sort of algorithms and bot, you know, to your question about am I a human building, bots and things like that.

Blockchain. If you think, well, there's a website publisher, and there's someone who's gone to that website to look at the content and then there's someone who's an advertiser who's paying for adverts on that. Using the blockchain to [01:00:00] know, well, how many intermediaries sit between the advertiser and who owns the publisher and what are they all doing?

Um, the publisher wants to know that the advertisement, cause the advertiser says, if I spend a dollar and the publisher's only getting 50

Is that okay? It might be okay because there might be 50 cents of value in between. blockchain would allow you to see that and then from the user go into the publisher, it's, what am I okay with that publisher knowing about me?

And then what am I okay with that publisher? Then sharing with an advertiser or another third party or you know, the blockchain for the user going straight to the advertiser cuz a relationship with, with the file. Right? So that. The technology is very interesting. Um, and yeah, there's loads of cool ways it could be used.

It's not really taken off.

It's not sort of a hit, sort of critical mass in the consumer world, yet we definitely keep an eye on it. Cause I think once someone does a really good job, there's a few companies using it for anti-fraud and things like that, but there's already good companies out there that are solving the fraud and fraud without the use of blockchain.

So just going, oh, well we do it with blockchain, great. Blockchain's a really novel technology, but how are you applying it? So we keep, we are keeping a very close eye on what's happening in that consumer world because as soon as someone comes up with that killer use case, we can then we can bring it across.

But as a, it's a, it's a very cool novel technology. But I'll come to the, what I was saying earlier about the, what do you wanna do, what's the. What challenge or the problem you're trying to solve? And if blockchain's the right tool, 

it, could, you know, 

use 

Mike Koelzer, Host: It, either, has to be cheaper and easier and more efficient than anything we have, which we're not close to. Let's say that's 10 years away, or it has to be a real specific use that really any other way, can't do a good job of doing it. Then it's like, let's introduce blockchain and do it.

But just to do it because you can do it. It's premature for that.

Gareth Shaw: yeah, sort of, in the advertising industry, it was, we, it was a running joke every year, so probably about 10 years ago now, or no, 10 10 between 10 and five years ago every year was the year of mobile. Like everything was gonna go mobiles and it never, it, like every year was the year,

but it never happened.

But then suddenly it was synonymous, like every, you know, Everything was smartphones, were, it just, it, and it kind of didn't happen overnight, but it was Oh yeah. Mobile. And then we kind of almost forgot about it, and it's, oh, wow. And I think the same thing will happen with blockchain. It's like, oh, it's amazing.

You can do all this stuff. And probably in five years or 10 years time, blockchain will be powering a whole load of what we do now in a more efficient manner. But I don't, and I probably, I, I'm prepared to be wrong on this, but I don't think there'll be this big, oh, blockchain solves the problems. I just think it'll suddenly, it'll be synonymous with a whole, it'll just be in the background.

and it just comes in the radar and helps us solve the problems we're solving now in a better way. But I don't think it'll disrupt the end user. If it's done well, the end user won't be too, it won't be this big, like, well, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Yes. 

Gareth Shaw: Now it's blockchain. It's 

like, oh, just incrementally better.

Mike Koelzer, Host: And I think it's also gonna go through, the.com, you know, it's this, then it's the bubble, then it gradually comes up. And same with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency I know is with the blockchain, but then you might see a blockchain bubble.

Maybe if a couple people do it effectively, we'll just kinda wait till it hits bottom after about six or seven years. when it's on his way up, we can get into it then.

Gareth Shaw: If I make a dollar bet, I would say in 10 years time it'll be everywhere. But within that 10 years, the. We as a society won't, won't see that change. I think it'll just 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Yes. 

Gareth Shaw: in. But that's 

my dollar bet, 

Mike Koelzer, Host: That's interesting stuff. I love talking about that behind the scenes because I just don't get it anywhere and get someone like you that'll share your time. It's really fun to see that. Thanks for that and keep doing what you're doing.

Gareth Shaw: No, my, my pleasure. And, um, thank you for having me. Really enjoyed it.

 Thank

you. 

Mike Koelzer, Host: Thank you.