Our founding principle still stands true today

OCD Media was founded on the principles that smaller and midsized brands need smarter strategy and more diligent execution to succeed than the large mega agencies can provide. In fact, our mantra is “The true genius of any plan lies as much in the execution as it does in the concept”. For us, that means that having a great strategy is meaningless if your activation isn’t connected.

In the pharma space, you have your enterprise firms – Pfizer, Novartis, GSK, etc. – and they spend billions to market their drugs every year. You also have your challenger firms that have more modest marketing budgets. Our approach has been successful in achieving remarkable growth for those firms; firms like Takeda, Warner Chilcott, Watson Pharmaceuticals, Endo, and Spark Therapeutics.

It’s common for us to immediately find issues with the big agency’s work when we win assignments from them. In fact, recently we picked up a rare disease client and found that the larger holding company media agency they were using prior to us had significant disconnects between the strategy and the execution/activation.

For example, they used endemic media for only one HCP specialty when they should have targeted at least five of the frequent-prescriber HCP specialties. They did this to avoid the labor of managing direct buys so they could favor platform-based media. This brand needed to raise awareness among all their key specialties and their ATU (Awareness, Trial, and Usage) study demonstrated this failing.

But their missteps didn’t end there; because the drug treats rare diseases of the eye, targeting needed to be very specific. We found, however, that the prior agency had extremely loose targeting as part of their programmatic buy – they were targeting users with vision insurance and users interested in contacts and glasses, which is about 75% of US adults. And furthermore, even when they were targeting specific conditions, they targeted conditions that the drug doesn’t treat. A clear miss on their part and one that our agency quickly resolved.

For programmatic, they used four different DSPs, each managing a different tactic, and all done on a managed service basis. There was no reason for this; each of their tactics was not so unique that only one DSP could execute it. And the optimizations would be better if they self-managed these campaigns, plus, the cost to the brand would be lower. We were able to consolidate to a single DSP, self-managed the program, and saved the client over 25% on their programmatic alone, not to mention cutting the waste out of the buy.

Our search audit found that the prior agency overcomplicated the paid search accounts and campaign structure and had overlapping keywords—meaning different campaigns under the account bidding against each other for the same keywords, again making the client pay for their laziness and mistakes.

Lastly, we found that Google Analytics (GA) wasn’t set up properly nor were GA goals being ported to the paid search campaigns. The campaigns couldn’t be optimized for conversions or CPA. We connected the accounts, ported goals to AdWords, instituted Google Tag Manager, and added DCM Floodlight tags to report conversions from all digital media.

This all stands as evidence that our founding principle that challenger brands or brands with shallower marketing pockets need a smaller, nimbler agency partner that truly cares about its clients’ growth and is a better steward of its clients’ marketing dollars.

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