The “Outsider” Rewiring Pharma Media and Marketing

On first glance, Gozde Dinc comes across as the consummate pharma media and marketing insider. Her industry experience spans four countries—her native Turkey, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States—and a pair of celebrated tenures at Roche and Genentech. In her current role as Genentech’s director, media, strategic partnerships and innovation, digital marketing, she’s an in-demand speaker and panelist. If you ask people in the business whom they credit for the company’s agility and creativity in the digital realm, Dinc’s name is always among the first mentioned.

Yet Dinc says she has felt like an outsider for much of her career, which she attributes in part to her educational background. “I don’t know a lot of computer scientists and engineers in pharma marketing,” she says. “It wound up being right for me.”

Dinc grew up in a town so small that, she recalls, “Even a lot of people in Turkey hadn’t heard of it.” After a short stint working for IBM as a software engineer and technology consultant, she entered the healthcare world as a technology business analyst at Roche.

Dinc’s transition to the marketing side of the industry commenced shortly thereafter. It started with a project that consolidated Roche’s numerous customer-facing websites into a single portal per European region, then grew to include digital transformation in a host of markets across the continent.

“It was a time when everybody was trying to figure out how to do more than just brand-dot-com websites, because those sites were starting to be like the pens they used to give out to doctors,” Dinc says. “I wanted to show that you could do [digital media and marketing] in a way that would drive business, not just put a brand out there like you did with a pen.”

The media/marketing focus proved a natural fit, and one very much aligned with Dinc’s professional priorities. “At first I wasn’t sure that I’d stay in this industry for long, but I enjoyed that I get to touch people’s lives at a time when it’s needed—and also create a lot of impact business-wise,” she says.

Big Brands and Office Hours

Upon arriving at Genentech (and the U.S.) in 2017, Dinc was immediately thrown into the fire, courtesy of the imminent launches of hemophilia therapy Hemlibra and multiple sclerosis drug Ocrevus. As manager, digital marketing for both products, Dinc’s remit was almost intimidatingly expansive: She needed to generate broad awareness across HCP, patient and caregiver audiences while simultaneously appealing to specialist physicians. Her approach clearly resonated: Ocrevus became the most successful launch in Genentech history, with U.S. sales exceeding $300 billion by the end of 2018. Hemlibra generated $75 million in sales in 2018.

Since then, Dinc’s role has evolved to include strategic, CX and media responsibilities. When she was promoted into her current job in mid-2023, Dinc was charged with leading conversations with media partners and serving as a touchpoint for many of Genentech’s most important relationships.

“These are big marketing technology companies that are constantly iterating, so the question I like to ask is: What can we do better?” Dinc explains.

Dinc takes what she learns during these conversations and shifts into interlocutor/translator mode for her Genentech colleagues, disseminating her knowledge to the company’s brand marketers and media team members. She even holds regular office hours, during which anyone can drop in to ask questions or share ideas.

Dinc also helps steer Genentech’s media and marketing innovation fund, through which 40 or so projects are piloted every year. Owing to her expansive definition of what constitutes a pilot—”basically, anything we haven’t done here before”—the projects have taken the company’s digital team into uncharted waters.

One such project, which Dinc describes as “an AI co-pilot for doctors,” was trained on peer-reviewed articles and clinical data. “It’s not like asking ChatGPT, which might be pulling data from anywhere on the internet,” she explains.

Genentech head of digital marketing Oz Demir, who first met Dinc when he interviewed her for her current role, remains impressed with her drive and collaborative mindset. He recalls a highly time-sensitive project involving the workflows of more than 100 marketers, to which Dinc contributed even though it wasn’t technically part of her job description.

“She took on the challenge and compromised on her sleep, working around the clock to ensure we succeeded as a team,” Demir says, adding that this beyond-the-call-of-duty effort surprised exactly none of Dinc’s peers. “She has a goal and ambition for everything, at work but also outside of work.”

‘So much energy’

To that end, Dinc recently received her Masters of Business Administration degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She started the program only a few months prior to her promotion, at a time when she had a young child. “It took a lot of stamina,” she deadpans.

Dinc is currently on sabbatical, courtesy of a Genentech program that offers six weeks off to recharge every six years. She’s spending part of it in Albania, the 42nd country she has visited. “My goal is to have visited more countries than my age at all times,” she says. “It’s ambitious.” She hopes to check off a handful of South American destinations during her next excursion, possibly including a surf retreat in Costa Rica.

Her longer-term professional plans are more up in the air. “I love where I am right now,” Dinc says. “Everything I do is meaningful. I want that to continue.”

She’s not sure, however, what that might entail. “I get so much energy from sharing my experiences and learnings. I’ll keep doing that as a speaker at conferences, but maybe there could be a newsletter, maybe a training module,” Dinc continues. “You ask what I see myself doing in 10 years—well, 10 years is a long time. Ten years ago, AI wasn’t a thing yet.”

Which brings us back to the edge Dinc’s engineering and computer science background confers. Whether or not by design, the path she followed has landed her at the intersection of marketing and technology, at a time when almost everything that matters in pharma media and marketing lives there.

“Whenever I go to conferences now, almost all we talk about is AI,” Dinc says with a laugh. “Maybe I’m not such an outsider after all.”

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