About the Client
A global biopharmaceutical organization sought to modernize its direct-to-consumer and direct-to-patient (DTC/P) measurement and activation capabilities across its U.S. brand portfolio. As consumer expectations for personalized healthcare experiences rise, and as the broader digital landscape shifts around cookie deprecation and tightening privacy regulation, GTMC leadership recognized that legacy reliance on outsourced insights & analytics (I&A) capabilities was constraining brand performance, attribution clarity, and speed to market.
To address these challenges, the organization set out to transform GTMC’s DTC/P I&A function from outsourced and opaque to owned and optimized, standing up an in-house engine that could connect insights to activation, deliver closed-loop measurement, and meet the elevated compliance bar required to support a priority alliance specialty brand without disruption.
Goals
To support this transformation, they prioritized four interconnected objectives:
- Capability Internalization: Insource patient I&A activities from external vendors to capture cost efficiencies, retain institutional knowledge, and increase strategic control over media decisions and spend.
- Closed-Loop Measurement and Attribution: Establish an enterprise KPI framework, tagging standards, and triangulated measurement approaches (MMM, incrementality, causal impact) to replace fragmented vendor reporting with a single source of truth for campaign performance.
- Compliant, Scalable Activation: Enable precise audience segmentation, lookalike modeling, and cross-channel orchestration through clean-room and CDP architectures designed for HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, MLR, and alliance-brand protocols from day one.
- Operating Model Resilience: Build a future-state target operating model, governance, roles, talent, and ways of working, that supports cross-brand scaling without disrupting service to the priority specialty brand during transition.
Solution
The organization partnered with a consulting and technology advisory team and its existing GTMC omnichannel transformation partner, to lead a phased DTC/P Measurement & Activation Transformation. The advisory team brought in Bridgenext as its technology, data, and analytics partner to provide the specialized technical depth required across maturity assessment, architecture design, and implementation planning. The teams operated as one delivery unit, with the advisory team accountable for change management and operating model design and Bridgenext leading the analytics and technology workstreams.
The engagement was structured as a 9-month, five-phase program: Discovery & Current State Assessment, Future State Design & Business Case, Use Case Prioritization & Implementation Planning, Capability Build & Pilot Launch, and Optimization & Cross-Brand Scaling.
Key components of the solution included:
- Maturity-Based Current-State Diagnostic: Bridgenext’s Consumer I&A and Advanced Media Targeting maturity frameworks were applied alongside the advisory team’s operating-model and capability assessments to benchmark their current state across people, process, technology, and data, and surface quick-win opportunities alongside long-term capability investments.
- Compliant Analytics & Measurement Architecture: Reference designs for audience segmentation, lookalike modeling, MMM, incrementality testing, and causal-impact analysis were built against a clean-room and CDP architecture, with HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, MLR, and alliance-brand data-isolation requirements embedded from the outset rather than retrofitted.
- Insourcing Roadmap and Target Operating Model: A future-state operating model was co-designed with the organization, defining governance, decision rights, in-sourced versus retained-external scope, talent and hiring plans, and a total cost of ownership business case to support the transition.
- AI-Accelerated Delivery: Bridgenext applied AI tooling across discovery-to-delivery workflows, requirements gathering, knowledge extraction, documentation, and code review, to compress build timelines, while introducing forward-looking capabilities such as conversational analytics, next-best-action modeling, and consumer journey prediction into the future-state roadmap.
- Integrated Change & Enablement: Their advisory team led the change management and communications workstream, stakeholder impact assessment, leadership activation, training, and adoption sustainment, to embed the new operating model into existing GTMC channels and avoid layering disconnected efforts onto in-flight transformation work.
Results
Through the program’s first four phases, the organization has stood up the foundation of an in-house DTC/P measurement and activation capability which helped them achieve the following:
- Established a board-ready operating model and business case for in-sourcing core DTC/P insights and activation capabilities.
- Built a prioritized use-case portfolio across segmentation, lookalike modeling, measurement, and orchestration.
- Developed an enterprise KPI and attribution framework enabling closed-loop measurement across channels and brands.
- Piloted a compliant clean-room and CDP architecture for privacy-safe audience targeting and cross-channel orchestration.
- Created a scalable governance and change framework to support expansion across Specialty Care, General Medicines, and Vaccines.
