Pam Caputo, Associate VP of Media & Engagement at PRECISIONeffect

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Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, everyone saw Marquez here today, I have the privilege of hosting the excellent Pam Caputo. She is the associate vice president of media and engagement at Boston based Precision Effect, which also has offices in Los Angeles and London. Precision Effect is the nation’s only health care advertising agency dedicated to working with companies seeking to change the standard of care. Every day, Pam brings her immense creativity to maximize the Right. apps and social media to reach clients intended audiences. She went from being the agency’s only media strategist to building a high performing integrated media team that pushes traditional boundaries to drive behavioral shifts in health care. Pam mastered the principles of big data long before it was a buzzword in twenty. Twenty, medical marketing and media named her to the first ever forty under forty class. They also honored her as a woman to watch, which recognizes standout health care executives. I’m really interested in a discussion today because many of you that are putting in the hard work, rolling up your sleeves in your day to day, oftentimes that struggle is getting found or how do people find out about me and how do I make an impact? That’s what we’re going to touch on with Pam today. And so, Pam, such a privilege to have you here on the podcast.

Thank you so much. And thank you for such a wonderful introduction.

Oh, for sure. And mean you’re doing so many interesting and impactful things and the focus is health care. So I’m really, really excited to dive in. Before we jump into the work that you’re doing and precision effect, talk to us a little bit more about you and why health care.

I think I can, by the way, of health care, a little bit of an accident. So I have a degree in history. I love history. I love research, which probably lends itself pretty well to digital. But I started my career at a living history museum. So that means one of those places where people dressed in costume from a specific time period. And when you work in a nonprofit museum, you get to basically try your hand at whatever you like. You know, they’re they’re always short staffed. So you get to try whatever piqued your interest. And I got interested in the agency that we were working with. So that agency started talking to us about our small little media budget and shifting it away from from print media to radio to billboards. And I asked a lot of questions about why how did they know that our audience needed to see a billboard versus a newspaper ad? And what did that look like and what was the messaging? And at the end of my career there at the museum, I actually switched spots. I went to an agency and the person I worked with from the agency wanted to get into non-profit work. And so we just kind of switched. And, um, I’ve been in media ever since.

Nice. That’s great. And those those living history museums are so cool.

By the way, I was also a history major classical humanities, really useful because it provides a great foundation, I think. Yeah, I love it.

Same here, Pam. And certainly I think as we think about health care and really the the exercise of getting influencing people’s behavior, it’s critical to have that human aspect at the core of it. So talk to us a little bit about precision effect and the work you guys are doing. How are you adding value to the ecosystem?

Sure. So while I was at another media agency, I started working with Precision Effect. They didn’t have media in-house. And I got really interested in the health care space and what Precision Effect was doing. I thought maybe health care would be boring, one size fits all. But there’s so much depth in health care and there’s so many different ways to speak to people in so many different audiences within that health care marketing space. So persistent, in fact, really got me excited because we aligned so closely with strategy and really getting into that behavioral psychology of thinking through how people make decisions and change their behaviors and how we can influence that with marketing and messaging. And that’s what Precision Effect does so well. That’s why they’re able to claim that they change the standard of care and they’ve been doing it for over 40 years.

Well, it’s really interesting, Pam, and changing the standard of care is something that is critical, right? I mean, you think about all the efforts aimed toward that and a lot of them being around cost and how much care costs and all those posts and articles on Mavin and why it failed. It’s about the small things. So talk to us about what you guys are doing that you feel is different and maybe better than what’s available today.

Sure. So I think what happens when you get into a room with a client and they want their product, whatever it is, to go big and they want everyone to prescribe it or everyone to use it or everyone to buy it. And in actuality, before we make any decision in our life, we’ve actually thought through a dozen or so small steps to get us to that final product. And so what we do is we map out every single one of those small steps that we want a person to take, whether it’s a health. Or physician or a patient or consumer. And so by mapping that out, we’re able to then think through that media about why and where they’re going to interact with us, and then we get to measure it on that back. And so it’s a kind of an arduous process to think through every tiny step. But by doing that, you’re able to see how you’re taking those tiny mindshift differences and marching them towards that final product, that final goal, whatever that key performance indicators is, that’s what we do so well. And that’s what makes us different than anyone else in the industry.

That’s that’s really interesting. And it is about those small shifts, right, Pam? I mean, it’s just like something so simple could add a huge amount of traction.

Yes, I agree. And I think that for patients in particular, if I just go down a patient for a second, if we are asking them to be on a new drug, well, what is the problem we’re trying to solve? What are the pain points that the patients are having? And so you’re starting to dive into that psychographic information. How long has a patient been dealing with these symptoms or did it take them 10 years to even get a diagnosis? And they don’t know where to reach out to advocacy for any kind of content or information on their disease. So really thinking through and putting yourself in a patient’s perspective gives them information that they value and are more likely to use. And it kind of again, goes back to thinking through that step by step behavioral change that you’re trying to help them with. So in the beginning, we were starting to get downloaded about a particular therapeutic area or a drug. Our medical team is wonderful and they certainly do a deep dive of all the nitty gritty of what proteins and pathways are doing. What I like to come into the meeting and start thinking through what those patients are thinking and what those physicians are thinking.

So what is this patient population like? What are their daily lives like? Do they have to see a lot of specialists? How long do they take to get diagnosed, visit an entire decade, or is this something that happens pretty fast? Does this patient population go out or are they stuck at home? Do they have any comorbidities? And what are they where are they living in the US? Can we go target them? Is there a hot spot which you would be surprised to find in the rare disease world? There often are. And what other drugs are they taking? What kind of symptoms do they have? And I think thinking through like that, you start to get a better picture of who this patient is that we are trying to reach or for the physicians who this patient is and what additional tests might be needed. And so you can start collecting and thinking through what their daily lives like and how we intersect those behavior, changes the media that matches to that behavior change and thinking through that daily life and what those habits are that we’re trying to influence.

That’s a great example, Pam. And so there’s a lot of, I guess, campaigns. And so we’ve got folks listening to us from from provider organizations, payers and companies. Are you guys helping really the broad spectrum of companies get their message out to their intended recipients? Or would you say that you’re mainly focused with a particular vertical within health care?

So we focus a lot on the physician marketing and the patient and the direct consumer. We have done a little bit on the value side of that, but we have one of our sister organizations positioned for value that really focus on that. But the same strategy really applies when you just think about the person. And instead of maybe the job title, of course, that influences but the person themselves. You know, if you go to Google right now and you say, how many ads am I seeing a day, that’s five thousand ads, that’s crazy. So by thinking through what they’re actually looking for, that information they’re needing, then you’re just going to get better results over all of it.

We’re looking to to drive results, whether it be encouraging our communities to take the covid vaccine or to encourage continued care Right.. There’s been such a huge gap in care, people aren’t going in and as a result, they’re suffering and the long term will be more costly to the health care system, let alone the individual. But also health system revenues are down because of it. And so I imagine the work that you guys do is targeted at helping drive that type of behavior change that encourages people to go see their doctor.

Absolutely. And I think that’s actually covid has obviously changed all of our behavior and the the pharmaceutical space, the health care space we’ve always been behind in the digital world. Before I went into health care, the media shocked that I was that was more consumer based. And so digital aspects of planning and buying and optimizing have been well established in that industry and pharmaceutical. It hasn’t. And so this has really shifted and really pushed health care and pharmaceuticals to think digitally. How can we how can we put that technology in front of people? So they’re still getting care. You’re seeing telemedicine spike, and I think that some of these programs will continue. I don’t think digital is going to go away. I think. The measurability of it, the accessibility of all of that are going to be important features as we move on and hopefully covid become somewhat behind us. I don’t know that it ever goes away, but at least maybe not in front of our face all the time.

Yeah, I really hope that, too. And I think this is the year. And as you and your team look at the impact you’re having. Talk to us a little bit about how you’ve improved business or even outcomes for some of the clients you’re working with.

Yeah, so with digital data and big data. And I think that big data, that term’s been around forever. Forever. Everybody wants a report. Everyone wants to see what what their campaign is doing. But what we haven’t been good at as an industry is establishing that Arawa, that return on investment, because frankly, it’s hard to do that in our industry. We can’t always tie directly to script lift or my digital banner drove a physician to prescribe this drug. It doesn’t necessarily work like that, but we’re getting better and we’re getting closer to that. We’re able to do that because of digital before when it might take six months to a year to get that Symfony data and Skripal, if you’re getting that more digitally available. So now you’re seeing more real time. So do you think about precision effects kind of step by step strategy, aligning that with KPIs that we can measure to? Well, now we’re seeing some data. Now we’re seeing that we can get people from point A to point B and measure that lift, or maybe we’re not getting them to be, but we’re doing C and D really well and we can reallocate funds. And so you’re getting a smarter, more digitally savvy platform that you’re able to optimize against to kind of ensure those outcomes. If it’s grip lift, is it is it more of benefits, investigations for insurance for payers, all of those aspects? You can measure them now in real time. And that’s going to make a huge difference in health care. And it’s going to lead us to the next frontier, which I am super excited about.

Yeah, it is exciting. And what is the next frontier, Pam? I mean, what what are your thoughts on that?

So what I am incredibly excited about is thinking this more as evidence based health care marketing, not just awareness lift, which is important, but evidence based and moving it forward. And the other thing that’s tied into this evidence platform is thinking through and be a next best action. So if someone, a health care provider, has seen an ad or read an article or been to the site, what’s the next thing we should be showing them with that next piece of information that health care provider needs to feel comfortable prescribing our drug or leading to the new treatment? Is it another case study or is it a video from Ricco? Well, being able to have actionable data against those elements to get the information in front of them that saves their time to physicians are busy. They’re so busy and they have to stay up to date on so many different aspects of their job. This just makes it a more streamlined and efficient approach that I think benefits everyone.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. Right. And if you’re going to know the next best action, you really have to have an intimate understanding of your particular audience, right? I mean, you get to know what motivates them. What what makes them afraid.

Yes. And so if you don’t have that base, that foundation, that step by step behavioral mapping that you’re trying to do, well, then your next best action isn’t based on anything solid or based in any kind of foundational proof.

So you really need to do that work before you can just jump all the way to the end.

Fascinating and passionate as you think about some of the biggest setbacks, Right., if you like, we learn more from setbacks than actual wins. Talk to us about one of those and a key learning that that came out of it.

Sure. So I think one of the biggest challenges I found when I first started working in space is all the rules and regulations. I think we hinted at that before with the fact that so many rules pharma is a little bit behind and it’s not necessarily their fault. They’re working within the strict guidelines that keep us all safe. And so that even leads me to when I look at hiring different people on my team. I don’t always want them to have health care background because I want them to think outside of the box. And then how can we kind of put it within the box that we need to? For example, one of my favorite campaigns that we were able to do was with epinephrine auto injector, something like like an EpiPen. And for physicians, our insight there, the foundation was they don’t necessarily care what kind of brand you have as long as you’re carrying it. If you have an allergic reaction and my son has a peanut allergy, like carry the product that will save their life. So as long as you’re caring, that’s fine for families. It made them cautious. They couldn’t do all the things that they would might want to do with their kids. And in a brainstorm, we thought about what would be the worst place to take your kid with a peanut allergy. And we came up with baseball. I mean, baseball, peanut shells are everywhere, everywhere. And so then we thought through how could. We solve that, so we worked with minor league baseball, really family friendly, we were able to do it across the country and have peanut free game night. And so we were taking that challenge, that aspect that we thought would be really hard and making it family friendly and doing it in a way that was safe and compliant and everyone felt good about.

I think that’s really neat. And so how did the program resonate? Did they reach out to a bunch of families? And what was the result? Just curious there.

Yeah. So the result was we had we had a ton of social media impressions. So will the media buy was strictly more with minor league and thinking through the the stadiums and the games and the teams. The outpouring success was more of a social media share. So we were able to see how far and how well it traveled. And we had minor league baseball teams that continue to do peanut free games. Once they found out it was somewhat easy to do, you kind of hosed down the seats, you take them off the menu. And yes. So the client found it successful. The sales team found it successful in each of their areas. And it was just a wonderful, family friendly program.

I love it. That’s so great. You know, and it’s these little things, these little tweaks that you do to to really have have success with some of these programs. As you mentioned at the beginning, it’s really understanding of the behavioral mapping that Pam and her team does so well. If you don’t think about it, you’re not going to have success. And so especially you think about specialty pharmaceutical drugs that require that the nudging to really help patients take advantage of their therapy and keep them consistent when the numbers are as bad as 50 percent adherence. So you guys are doing some incredible work. You talked about what is exciting you most today, but do you want to do you want to share anything else there?

I think the other thing that’s really exciting about today that gets me excited to stay in the health care industry is all of the work that’s going into rare disease. All of the advances that pharma is is able to push the envelope on. And in the back end, how can we find these these groups of of patients and consumers that may have never had relief before? And what does that look like? What are their daily lives? How can we impact them? And it just it truly is changing that standard of care. And so I think thinking through of what gets me excited on the marketing side is all that big data and actually using it. I think in health care in general, it’s just continuing to be and inspired by the work that comes out of the pharmaceutical companies of pushing that envelope to and to think we get to be a small part of getting that treatment to the right people. It’s just it’s a wonderful thing.

Yeah, I agree. Pam, you do your part and you help really save lives and keep people healthy. It’s something that they feel really good about getting out of bed in the morning and so really appreciate you sharing the insights. Obviously, this is tip of the iceberg, folks, on how you could best engage the consumers that you’re looking to engage. Pam, leave us with the closing thought here. Tell us where the listeners could get in touch and learn more.

I think that one thing that another thing that gets me excited about Precision Effect is that I am I am not the only one that gets inspired and excited and and gets all geeky at new data coming out. There is a whole team of us there, and I’ve heard that consistently.

And anyone I bring out onto my team of how exciting and passionate everybody is, I would encourage people to follow us. Precision Effect. It’s all one word on LinkedIn. Our our president, Carolyn Morgan, she does a video series on this MEDAKA moment and is just as passionate as I hope you can hear that. I am, too. And yeah, Precision Effect is doing wonderful things. We’re always going to be pushing to change that standard of care.

Love it, Pam. Really appreciate the invite there. And again, folks, precision effect all one word. Check them out. We’ll leave a link inside of the show notes so you could shortcut that and get get right in there, doing some amazing work, sharing a ton of great thought leadership and consumer engagement. Certainly. Pam, I appreciate you coming on and sharing the work that you guys are up to. Thanks for all you do. Thank you so much for inviting me.

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