30 TECHFEED Medicx
IN GOOD HEALTH With microtargeted, privacy-by-design ad solutions by Medicx, the pharmaceutical industry can market its products to those who need them most. Words By Neal Romanek
edicx Media Solutions provides a managed service for advertisers which allows for targeted marketing of pharmaceutical and life sciences products. Not just targeted. Super-targeted. Micro-targeted. In 2006 president and CEO Michael Weintraub launched Medicx with the aim of giving US healthcare industry advertisers, marketers and brands improved intelligence to help them better target their messaging. Educated as a pharmacist, Weintraub’s career took him into the pharmaceutical data space, including a post as GM of the health arm of Netherlands-based information services giant Walters Kluwer. He came to understand that there was a wealth of data available that wasn’t being fully leveraged to aid the industry.
“Back in 2006, the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector spent about $6 billion a year in direct-to-consumer advertising in the US. But a lot of that was wasted without the data technology to target it,” says Michael Joachim, Medicx SVP of growth and innovation. “Data wasn’t being applied to the consumer pharmaceutical space in any type of rigorous way.” When Medicx began, what could be accomplished with consumer data was still limited, and the technological infrastructure for fully taking advantage of that data was still a few years away. US data protection laws around health care, which are aimed at preserving personal anonymity, also restricted the ambition of data miners. “It took time for Medicx to be adopted,” says Joachim. “There was some hesitancy to utilise the sensitive type of information that we do. Marketers needed to understand that it was privacy-safe by design. But now the market has matured and so has Medicx as a company.”
Medicx’s targeted pharmaceutical marketing service works with some of the biggest health brands in the world, including Merck, Pfizer and Allergan. These companies are known primarily for their pharmaceutical research and production, but are also responsible for many top over-the-counter brands, such as Advil, Robitussin and Chapstick. The Medicx service helps these brands to more intelligently plan their marketing and advertising strategies by using medical and health data to infer the behaviour and requirements of consumers. THE TRANSACTION TRAIL The public health data most often utilised in the US health sector, including government health agencies, is sourced from de-identified and adjudicated insurance claims, which provide records of medical occurrences – visits to a doctor or dispensation of medication at a pharmacy.
IBS-D IN THE USA The above graphic shows prevalence of irritiable bowel syndrome with diarrhea across Medicx Micro-Neighborhoods
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