The Tchotchke Challenge: Repositioning
MediScripts for Success in the Digital World

The Client: The Last Promotion Before Prescription
In 1981, a new advertising media vehicle was introduced to the pharmaceutical industry. Medi-Scripts. It was an extraordinarily simple, extraordinarily powerful idea: Physicians would receive personalized prescription pads. And pharmaceutical marketers would be able to place their ads between the pages of those pads. With Medi-Scripts, pharma companies had something they'd never had before -- a way to put their messages right in physicians' hands, at the exact moment when they're making a prescribing decision.

For nearly 20 years, Medi-Scripts enjoyed almost effortlessly increasing sales and profits. And then everything changed.

The Challenge: Joining the Digital World
In recent years, pharma marketers have been shifting an increasing percentage of their marketing dollars away from traditional marketing vehicles and into digital channels.

This was incredibly frustrating for Medi-Scripts. Even though digital and social media had yet to prove their effectiveness as a marketing tool; even though MediScripts could actually demonstrate measurable engagement and extraordinary returns on investment (the average is 21:1!), pharma brands were still pumping more and more money into digital campaigns. And brand managers -- particularly young, up-and-coming ones -- began to dismiss Medi-Scripts as just another tchotchke, lumping it in with key chains, calendars and other nonessentials.

Our challenge was to find a way to move Medi-Scripts out of that tchotchke graveyard and into the world of multichannel marketing.

Positioning Strategy: A New Medium.
Our first step was to reposition Medi-Scripts using the language of the digital world: MediScripts. The most engaging medium. This deftly positioned Medi-Scripts not as another promotional item, but as an actual advertising medium -- one that offered superior engagement, the Holy Grail of current media strategy.

We then redesigned Medi-Scripts' rather dusty and dated brand identity, with a modern proprietary font and a brand icon specifically designed for use in digital applications. We even convinced them to remove the hyphen from "Medi-Scripts," and become simply MediScripts.

Targeting Strategy: The Key Three
Over the years, MediScripts had aimed the majority of its marketing efforts toward senior brand marketers at the major pharmaceutical companies. As career attrition had thinned the ranks of their contacts, MediScripts sales people were finding it harder and harder to connect with the younger, more digitally-focused brand managers and their agency teams.

We suggested broadening their targeting strategy to include those younger brand managers, agency media planners and agency creative directors. Why? Because brand managers control the budget. Media planners control the buy. And creative directors control the campaign idea.

Engagement Strategy: Multichannel Integration
The new MediScripts launched in September 2011, with a re-designed website, digital advertising campaign and marketing materials; an aggressive media relations program, executive visibility initiative, and a series of industry events. 

The new MediScripts website featured separate user interface pathways for our three targets. The Brand Manager path focused on the results and ROI; the Media Planner path focused on physician targeting; and the Creative Director path highlighted the creative possibilities of the medium. Each pathway ended in customized downloadable materials. 

A campaign of provocative digital teaser ads in pharmaceutical marketing sites and general advertising sites confronted the conventional media wisdom. Headlines like What ad is more effective than any ad on this site? and What handheld is more effective than iPhone, Android and Blackberry? drove our targets to the new MediScripts website in record numbers.

Erez Lapsker, the young CEO of MediScripts, became the public face of the brand, authoring bylined articles, white papers and podcasts, and hosting a Marketing Agency Happy Hour with representatives from key organizations.

Feature articles in major pharma marketing publications such as Med Ad News, PM360, PharmaVOICE repositioned the company, and legitimized point-of-prescription advertising with a new era of brand managers and agency teams.

Finally, using our own marketing muscle, Makovsky personnel brokered new relationships for the MediScripts sales team.

The Results: From Antiquated to Innovative
Our work for the new MediScripts produced immediate results. In the first 90 days of the campaign:

The bottom line? Within this very compressed time frame, the MediScripts launch campaign generated actual sales meetings with 20 major prospects and, to date, three new clients -- a roughly 4:1 return on MediScripts' investment.

Our work helped re-cast the company internally; energizing the sales force and equipping them with a more compelling way to sell their product. Erez Lapsker, MediScripts CEO, expressed his appreciation for the partnership: "We greatly appreciate the work Makovsky has done. Your team's brilliance has been transformational for our company."

But there was one final, and rather unexpected result. MediScripts, once considered an antiquated company with an irrelevant value proposition, was named PM360's Most Innovative Company of the Year, for its ability to show value within the digital space and convey measurable engagement.