Summary
The Impact Intelligence Dashboard is a comprehensive measurement and analytics tool that provides a consistent approach for a large pharmaceutical company to track progress, measure impact, and gain actionable insights. It centralizes paid, owned, and earned media in an advanced web-based platform and uses econometrics and machine learning to connect communications efforts to the client’s reputation data, thus offering real-time, actionable insights into the reputational impact of communications among healthcare professionals.

This helps the client to understand what is and isn’t working, optimize strategies, and make data-driven decisions, leading to tangible improvements in reputation.

Objective/Brief
Our client, a large, complex organization, was facing a challenge with fragmented measurement practices across different communication teams. This lack of a standardized approach in tools, data gathering, and setting KPIs hindered the leadership team from gaining a holistic view of business performance. Additionally, manual measurement processes resulted in delayed insights and decision-making based on intuition rather than data. To address these issues and revolutionize the decision-making process, we developed the Insights Intelligence Dashboard using advanced analytics, AI, and data engineering.

This transformative measurement approach appealed to our client for several reasons:

• Standardizes: It unifies measurement across their complex business, consistently demonstrating the impact of paid, owned, and earned communications efforts.
• Automated: It consolidates data and analytics into a single, comprehensive dashboard.
• Optimizes: It offers tactical guidance on effective strategies and identifies areas with low impact from a channel, publication, and disease area perspective.
• Predicts: It empowers the client to optimize their investment by highlighting the most impactful approaches based on metrics that matter the most.

Strategy
Our integrated measurement approach required input and support across functions and was broken out into key phases:

• Setting the direction
• Establishing a measurement framework
• Developing the dashboard, data engineering and reporting
• Deploying and onboarding teams
• Ongoing optimization

We began by defining KPIs aligned with the teams’ business objectives, taking stock of current measurement practices and available data streams, and involving a cross-functional team in designing a unified measurement framework that could be applied across different therapeutic areas.

Our approach focused on extracting more value from existing data. To achieve this, we collaborated with stakeholders across the business to gain access to data sets, developing a solution that integrated sources (e.g., primary research, investment, digital, and social data) into a single data lake and implemented cutting-edge AI-based analytics and reporting to demonstrate business impact in real-time via a dashboard, replacing traditional PPT decks and reports.

Our data engineering efforts consolidated inputs from all paid, owned, and earned media sources, organizing them around a strategic measurement framework focused on key metrics. Using econometrics and machine learning, we went beyond historical reporting to measure the impact on reputation, providing actionable insights into the tangible effects of communications efforts.

We also introduced reporting templates in the dashboard, pulling underlying metrics into an accessible, ready-to-download format, streamlining the reporting process and ensuring timely delivery of insights. This holistic approach significantly improved our clients’ understanding of performance across various media types and empowered them to optimize strategies effectively and maximize impact.

Execution/Implementation
We worked with the client to understand their specific needs and created a customized measurement framework to standardize performance evaluation across all activities. This ensured consistent metrics with enough flexibility to accommodate different team requirements.

The platform was designed to meet the tactical needs of front-line communications professionals and to provide the leadership team insights into how communications contribute to the company’s goals.

To achieve this, we developed an organizing framework and tagged the data based on:

• Individual mentions and content related to key communication moments.
• Key diseases and drugs targeted by all communications.
• Progress against the leadership team’s priorities.

We streamlined their data sources across the business to save time and money. The key to our success was aligning the data inputs feeding the data lake and platform, including:

• Earned Media
• Key Opinion Leaders
• Owned Website
• Owned Social Media
• Paid Media
• Primary Reputation Research

This integration allowed us to directly associate communication efforts with reputational outcomes. Our close collaboration with each team allowed us to tailor the platform to reflect their key competitors, key opinion leaders, and target audiences. This comprehensive approach provided detailed insights, enabling each audience to analyze historical and current performance data for future initiatives.

Using predictive analytics, we created advanced models to evaluate media quality and reputational impact. This culminated
in a dynamic dashboard to harness data-driven insights on a large scale.

Effectiveness of Assignment
The Barcelona Principles form the foundation of our approach to integrated measurement and are at the core of our Impact Intelligence Dashboard. This integrated measurement approach represents a significant departure from traditional methods and our client’s previous measurement practices.

Beyond standardizing measurement, setting measurable goals and providing teams and leadership with transparency and visibility of communications’ performance, it evaluates the teams’ actual impact by connecting online and offline performance with the client’s primary research data. Compared to traditional approaches, this enables a comprehensive view of the team’s performance and benchmarks against competitors and empowers us to derive actionable insights at a granular level.

Integrating data sources and segmenting across therapeutic areas, activations, and milestones enables precise understanding and optimization of communication efforts. This breaks down silos, enhances the effectiveness of communications and provides teams with a unified view:

• Measurement based on impact, not vanity metrics
• Shared access to validated data and results
• Ability to plan and set goals based on impact, not instinct
• Maximize impact by understanding how communications interact
• Actively determine the business impact of comms

The Impact Intelligence Dashboard not only provides quick access to insights but also allows for real-time modifications based on the most recent data, resulting in increased communication effectiveness.

Furthermore, the cost-effectiveness of the dashboard is notable. It immediately reduced measurement costs across the business by 24% by eliminating redundant solutions, automating manual processes, and reducing the number of vendors involved. This frees up more funds to do value-added work.

The dashboard has also significantly reduced time-to-insights. Tasks that once took weeks to compile are now completed in minutes. The platform provides immediate insights about our message pull-through, and insights gained from the platform have led to adjustments and changes to drive greater business outcomes. Notable outcomes of our integrated measurement approach include:
Media contributions to reputation increased 4% year over year despite a reduction in overall media volume. This was due to incorporating insights that focused the communications teams on quality over quantity, enabling them to do more with less.
Earned media contributions to reputation increased 37% year over year, primarily due to adjustments in earned tactics based on insights gained from the dashboard. The average quality in select top-tier media publications increased 4% year over year.

In summary, our Impact Intelligence Dashboard has transformed our clients’ approach to measurement and enabled us to
drive impactful and efficient communication strategies.