Direct-to physician marketing, FLoC: Wednesday’s daily brief

Good morning, Marketers, and Marketing Ops professionals of course.

My old buddy Scott Brinker went controversial on LinkedIn this week, and for me the timing could hardly have been better. “Marketing = Ops,” he wrote, which certainly made me blink. He did go on to explain: “Brand makes marketing. Customer experience (CX) makes brand. Ops makes customer experience.“

There was some pushback from people who wanted to point out that the marketing skill-set is not the same as the operations skill-set, and Scott was willing to acknowledge a kind of Venn diagram, where the overlap between marketing and ops was key.

By the time you read this, I’ll be headed down to Atlanta for the MO Pros Summer Camp, and I have a whole lot more questions now about how the jigsaw pieces of brand marketing, product marketing, marketing operations — not to mention sales and sales operations — all fit together.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

A new age of direct-to-physician marketing  

Marketing to physicians was notoriously difficult even before the pandemic made face-to-face meetings and conferences vanish almost overnight. Until recently, the best way for pharma companies to reach physicians was through “detailing,” a process that involves face-to-face sales and promotional activities.

About six years ago, Ogilvy Health, an agency within the Ogilvy Group, created a point-of-care division in response to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that healthcare professionals digitize electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Said Ritesh Patel, the Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy Health, “We understood that there would likely be an opportunity to engage with doctors on EMR platforms, so we built a team that is now working with pharma clients to focus on how they can engage with the physician within the EMR systems.”

Ogilvy Health works with Doceree (pronounced dock-CARE — the name is derived from the Greek word for doctor) to create healthcare provider campaigns aimed at reaching physicians across targeted websites, medical journals, and telemedicine platforms. Doceree, a precision-marketing platform specifically for healthcare marketing, enables personalized, relevant and targeted messaging within the EMR system.

Read more here.

Elements of Content: Breaking down MarTech’s Email Marketing Periodic Table 

The content provided within the email is just as important as the infrastructure and strategy behind it. From creating compelling Subject Lines (Sj) that drive opens to using Responsive designs (Rs) that adjust to all devices — mobile, desktop, etc. — the content of your email will be the main driver of results.

The Structure (St) of your email, whether HTML or plain text, should be scannable and easy to read. Readability (Rd) is a critical element to consider when building your emails, but have you evaluated whether the content is relevant to your audience? Relevance (R) is a key element to consider before sending an email. If your audience doesn’t care about the content you deliver, they won’t be opening your emails very often.

Read more here — and download the full periodic table here.

FLoC and the future of audiences 

Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder of Optmyzer and one of the first 500 employees at Google, takes a deep dive into the issues and challenges surrounding FLoC. “FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) is an interesting bird: mysterious and on the verge of extinction,” he writes. “If it disappears without a replacement, then along with the end of 3rd party cookies, advertisers may see a dramatic shift in the effectiveness of interest-based audience targeting. So despite recently announced delays in the retirement of 3rd party cookies in Chrome, it’s worth knowing what FLoC is all about.”

In his contributed article, Vallaeys explores the need for an alternative to third-party cookies; FLoC’s claims to protect user privacy; and possible benefits to — and new opportunities for — advertisers.

“Rest easy, even if there is no replacement for 3rd party cookies, this won’t necessarily be the end of interest-based audience targeting because ad tech companies like Google already use signals beyond 3rd party cookies to create audiences. It’s just that they would lose one powerful signal and as a result, advertisers would have to more closely monitor any resulting shifts in performance.

Read more here.

Quote of the day

“Writing for the guy who buys everything from you is pointless. Writing for the guy who buys nothing from you is pointless. Writing for the guy who is still on the fence is how you win. This is why long copy works.” Stephen Prately, Growth Consultant, The Conversion Co

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.

He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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