Initiative Health Unveils Genome

Initiative Health, a specialist media and marketing agency within IPG Mediabrands focusing on the international markets, has launched Genome, a new insights, marketing, and media toolkit tailored for the pharmaceutical, OTC, and wellness sectors.

The creation of Genome is designed to address the common challenges of understanding specialist, hard-to-reach healthcare audiences in a time and cost-efficient manner, focusing on providing robust insights and strategic support for healthcare marketers.

The 5 tools included in Genome are:

• HCP Insight Tool (HIT): A repository of proprietary behavioural insights for specialist HCP audiences across key ex-US markets.
• OESP Planner: A bespoke media planning tool.
• HCP Media Index: A tool that scores publishers across six different scorecards, adaptable to client requirements.
• HCP Connect: A programmatic tool for pinpointing audiences across ex-US endemic websites, automating media buys at an impression level.
• Vision RX: An interactive visual engine for targeting HCP audiences on a hyperlocal geographical basis.

Initiative Health’s Managing Partner, Laura-Anne Kell, explained: “As an agency we pride ourselves on taking a strategic approach to our client’s challenges.  To do this consistently across our client-base we realised we needed to invest in a robust insights tool. While some clients have data they are able to share, time and again – particularly in ExUS markets – we met a challenge where the level of insight we needed simply wasn’t there, or at least wasn’t there quickly.

“As part of IPG Mediabrands, we had the resources to be able to roll out a large scale primary research project, as well as leverage relationships with publishers and our inhouse development capability, to build five distinct tools which support each part of the marketing  planning process, from market and audience insight through to channel allocation, activation and measurement and optimisation.”

solli’s thoughts

The international (ex-US) pharma media market is rapidly transforming through investment in data-led tools. Agencies, publishers, and tech companies are all collaborating with clients to better understand HCP audiences’ engagement with media and subsequently intelligently plan and activate based on this.

Too often, the international pharma media market has bemoaned the lack of scalable data-driven insights into HCP media behaviours; instead relying on small HCP audience surveys or insights not tailored toward media decision-making.

This investment and product launch from the IPG Mediabrands’ agency will contribute to the industry’s continued transformation away from this staid status quo.

It will be interesting to see how clients harness these tools, where other international agencies invest, and finally, how publishers support this insight work for higher-quality HCP media decision-making.