• by Les Luchter , March 5, 2025

“Not often do you see a lot of Stage Four cancer patients feeling like they want to go out for a jog,” said Chelsea Marti, director, content, Novartis.

As a result, the pharma firm’s promotional content for such drugs as Kisqali now features people engaged in “things that really matter"  -- like “having a conversation with their friends, cherishing a special moment, spending more time with their children” -- instead of “running and jumping off a cliff,” Marti told MediaPost’s Pharma & Health Brand Insider Summit last week.

“We have an opportunity to break through by looking different than other brands in our space,” said Marti, who works with Novartis’ three-year-old Content Lab. “We do that by thinking about things like authentic photography, storytelling, infographics and HCP [healthcare provider] education.”

Adding infographics to previously data-heavy documents that company reps present to HCPs, for example, helps them “quickly get into the conversation and convey what they need to say without getting lost in the data,” Marti related.

She showed attendees “before and after” pictures of an educational piece launched at this year’s San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The former contained “text heavy, dense, hard-to-read, hard-to-follow” content. The latter replaced that with better use of color and “light,airy and easy-to-convey data… clear, concise text and infographics telling the story.”

Marti also presented Summit-goers with five “Best Practices for Content Excellence”:

First, she said, “make sure the content initiatives you’re working on directly support organizational objectives and market demands.” This will help in relations with agencies, peers and other content team members.

Second, “make sure you are flexible with that content strategy. I work with my brand partners a ton and things change every day. You have to build a content strategy and system that is nimble to some extent, or it’s not going to work. It’s going to quickly be outdated, people won’t use it, and they’ll just go outside of it."

Third, “use data and analytics to optimize your content performance and resource allocation. It takes time to gather that data,” Marti noted, but by having “data to back up what we say, you’re going to have a lot better conversation.”

Fourth, “create continual learning to enhance team capabilities. I saw this happen very slowly at first with us, but it’s starting to pick up steam.”  Novartis brands, Marti said, are now “getting really excited to compete, be first to accomplish a new feat, and get themselves featured [in content].”

Fifth, “use advanced tools to automate where possible, drive collaboration and make content optimization easier.”

“There’s a lot of promise when it comes to AI,” Marti acknowledged, “but there’s also a lot of promise if you look around at the tools already in your organization. There’s a chance those could help you with your content mapping, strategy and planning process.”