With over 38,000 attendees attending from all over the world, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Conference is the largest cancer focused-conference in the world.
For five consecutive days, stakeholders concerned about expanding cancer knowledge and improving cancer care for patients gather in Chicago to listen, speak, ask questions, interact at booths, read posters and network with their peers. The conference center and all adjacent hotels and bustling city streets are buzzing 24/7 with impromptu and planned meetings between friends, colleagues, peers, and business associates from all over the world. The amount of information shared can be daunting and even getting around from one meeting room to another can be a feat all on its own.
For physicians and pharma companies alike, schedules are chock full with very little wiggle room for company sponsored social events, educational symposia, investigator meetings, or advisory boards. There are always conflicting data sessions, posters, and presentations, and many of the top key opinion leaders are asked to attend multiple events in very tight time spaces. As a result, even with the best intentions for meeting in person, these crowded, data-numbing, and information-overwhelming conferences are not always the most effective for securing face-to-face meetings. We often find pharma companies, which end up sending huge cohorts of employees to meet, educate, and socialize with their key customers, somewhat disappointed with the numbers of people who they actually met up with for a meal, coffee, or who attended their company-sponsored social event, symposium, or advisory board.
At Impetus Digital, we find that more and more pharma clients are leveraging online portals such as the Impetus InSite Platform to engage with their key customers before and after the ASCO conference. Before the meeting, many clients will leverage asynchronous online assignments to have the physicians that they are either sponsoring to attend or meeting in person for a working session, select out key topics, sessions or posters that they plan to report back on after the conference. They will also use this platform to provide slide templates or working documents that the physicians can download in advance or use online during the meeting to populate while attending the conference. The sponsored physicians can also answer discussion forum questions via InSite Exchange™ in advance of seeing the data presented at ASCO, giving their predictions on the data highlights, the reactions that may be expected by other physicians and the potential implications on their clinical practice.
These pre-work touchpoints can also be followed by post-conference web meetings where insights gathered from the sponsored physicians who attend ASCO can be compiled by a medical writer to be used as the central focal point of the discussions. The other advisors on the web meeting can then further discuss and debate the posters, sessions, and symposia that were attended so that deeper insights and implications can be gathered. The end product can be comprehensive slide decks authored by the sponsored advisors that can then enter the educational material development processes within pharma companies for further use by sales forces, MSLs, or other interested parties within cross-functional teams. Alternatively, a post-ASCO asynchronous online assignment can follow the pre-work by asking similar questions but now with the intention of understanding if the predictions and sentiments originally shared by the sponsored physicians have changed since they attended the conference and have reacted to what their peers have expressed.
Leveraging online touchpoints through the Impetus InSite Platform is simple, compliant, and secure. Impetus can set up an advisory board of oncology experts or you can invite ones you specifically choose yourself and this can be turned around within a few days. It is an excellent way to gain mindshare with the specialists, who are often literally being stretched in multiple directions with their own personal agendas and priorities, and with the competing forces of multitudes of other pharma companies and their new drugs and indications. In addition, a single advisor touchpoint can save you up to 75% of the costs of running an in-person meeting and can result in 50% more insights and 30% greater customer engagement. Impetus has deep expertise and relationships within the Oncology space and would be happy to speak to you about ways for you to leverage the data that were shared about your product at ASCO this year or the implications of competitor data on your brand.