Challenge

A leading advertising opportunity for pharmaceutical companies marketing OTC products in the Canadian market is the Sympatico MSN portal. Sympatico MSN is Canada's leading consumer portal with over 8 million page views daily and 17.2 million unique monthly users. Of that total traffic, Sympatico MSN's Health & Fitness Channel generates 2.1 million visitors monthly.

The challenge for OTC pharmaceutical product managers was the limited ad unit targeting capabilities within the portal experience. This limitation reduced the ability to effectively align campaign messaging with user needs, thereby limiting the overall effectiveness of advertising campaign programs.

Solution

Working with a group of pharmaceutical industry partners and Sympatico MSN, ExMI developed a new therapeutic channel within the Health & Fitness section of the portal and created unique, customized content that addressed core consumer information needs. Each channel was updated with new information weekly. Within each of these customized "New in Health" channels, participating pharmaceutical companies were given dedicated run-of-page advertising.

The core of the solution was a rich-media advertising vehicle that allowed users to interact with various stages of the customer acquisition ladder. This ensured that each click-through was better qualifi ed and that users' specific information needs were better managed. Each expandable, rich-media ad unit included three core content offers:

• Awareness: Introduction of the product in the content of the therapeutic channel.
• Education: Diagnostic information, tools and quizzes to show the benefi ts of the product and help users understand how the product can help them.
• Choice: A call-to-action directing users to existing online product sites and services. These activities included linking to free-trial e-vouchers and product support sites.

Sympatico MSN committed to deliver 300,000 visitors for each custom therapeutic content area over a program's duration.

Participating pharmaceutical companies included Pfizer (Nicoderm), Wyeth (Centrum Advantage, Advil) and Galderma (Cetaphil Acne Principles).

Results

The contextually-driven online advertising programs deployed on Sympatico MSN outperformed industry benchmarks in terms of ad-unit click-through rates. Moreover, high levels of media unit engagement with users prior to their clicking through helped drive highly qualified traffic to existing product sites.

Compared with industry benchmark average CTRs of 0.10% to 0.15%, the contextually-driven rich-media units performed at a CTR of 0.27% to 0.74%. The media units demonstrated a consistently high level of user engagement ranging from 1.16% to 1.54%. This engagement in the custom therapy channel content reinforced core brand awareness.