In 2018, the Informa Pharma Intelligence editorial and marketing teams collaborated on the release of its annual white paper analyzing the evolution of pharma R&D for the past year. But this wasn’t your typical medical or scientific report. It was more music to their audience’s ears.
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“Using the evolution of music as the backdrop for the 2018 report, the team set the trends in therapeutics, diseases and company pipelines up against everything from present day pop charts to the birth of jazz,” wrote Informa on their 2019 SIPAward-winning entry for Best Editorial and Marketing Collaboration. “Additionally, the team created webinars, an infographic, additional articles, a supplement, and even an accompanying Spotify playlist based off the white paper to ensure its life extended beyond the initial launch and provided value for Pharma Intelligence clients throughout the year.”
Indeed there is a list on Spotify called Pharma R&D Annual Review 2018 with 23 songs such as U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for, Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You and Lady Gaga’s The Edge of Glory. And the cover of the Annual Review features images of headphones, a concert and a microphone.
Subheads in the report play off the music theme:
- Plenty of debut singles, but the middle-eight is sounding a bit flat;
- Novartis is still top of the pops;
- New technologies call the tune;
- Despite inharmonious times, Pharma keeps on rockin’ and rollin’.
The report and webinar acquired more than 875 client downloads and registrations resulting from Informa Pharma Intelligence email campaigns and website visits. And this engagement resulted in big revenue for Informa Pharma Intelligence from leads.
What jumps out at me here, besides these high notes, is the collaboration. That spirit of working together and sharing knowledge is also at the heart of SIPA’s new-and-just-about-ready-to-roll Executive Councils. Fortunately, there’s still time to sign up here.
The Councils—with some built around executives and others key topics—will consist of 12 niche publishers who meet by video conference 11 times a year, plus once a year for an in-person meeting in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with SIPA’s annual conference in June.
“It’s so easy to get stuck in the day-to-day dealing with in-house fires,” said Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine. She looks forward to “forcing myself out of the weeds at least once a month to focus on the business instead of in the business. She also has the unique perspective of having been a member of Vistage, a peer network group.
While that membership has allowed her to “take a high-level step back, hear from the outside and focus on strategy and big opportunities,” it has been with people who don’t know her industry.
“I am really looking forward to taking that same council idea but doing it with my industry,” she said. “They’ve lived and understood your same exact challenges and will have unique insight and perspective. There are shared real-life experiences. The other thing I like is that you don’t have to leave your office to get this value.”
The last line of Informa’s winning entry sums up the value of collaboration. “[Our] clients rely on [our] expertise to make decisions in their respective industries, and while Ian Lloyd has been the well-known author of the report for some time, it’s a task unable to be achieved without incredible interdepartmental cooperation between analysts, editors, marketing and content teams.”
That same cooperation and collective spirit should turn up the volume for any SIPA publisher. Check out the Executive Council landing page here where you can ask for further information and learn the benefits and costs involved. We’re very excited that this idea has finally come to fruition for SIPA.
