The keys to journal integration are simple. Once you craft the message that will resonate with your target audience, it's time to make sure you're using the correct media vehicles. Whether journals, targeted media, digital media or convention media, it's critical to understand the hearts and minds of your prescribers, and especially where they are accessing information. Journals themselves have continued to be the top source of info for physicians, but as budgets tighten, and schedules constrict, it becomes critical to know which are those most favored by your target physicians. After that, you need only determine the reach and frequency warranted by your product's lifecycle stage needs and the competitive landscape, to ensure the right level of journal integration into your media schedule.

We believe mobile, in general, will offer tremendous opportunity for our clients to reach, interact, and create dialog with their customers in ways that were never possible before. Everyone at CMI has received their own iPad so we can all be in the position to experience firsthand how these technologies are going to change the way communication interaction will take place in the future. Clients are no longer constrained by the traditional "pushing" of messages into the marketplace. They are now in a position to create relatively low-cost, but useful, applications that help physicians treat patients and help patients care for themselves by becoming better-informed consumers of healthcare. In doing so, they can create an even stronger connection with our clients' brands than promotional messages can achieve by themselves. The interactivity of these new technologies allows our clients to become a part of the discussion taking place around their brands and the conditions they treat. Rather than having to talk at their customers, they can now speak with their customers.

No surprises here. Pharma clients must always ensure success and accountability from all their expenditures. The more visible and attention-getting aspects of media spending changes have always been more obvious given third-party audits, media suppliers and others impacted when budgets are suddenly altered. Last-minute budget reductions represent a band-aid approach to expense control and can reduce promotional impact. Satisfying budget limitations while achieving desired behavioral responses are better dealt with at the source, and at the outset, to ensure proper planning and buying through application of a fully integrated and accountable process. Efficient planning, coupled with well-executed and optimized media buying, can produce required efficiencies without sacrificing results.

Today, media is tasked with creating engagement and facilitating dialog among clients, healthcare providers, patients, and caregivers. And thanks to the technology of our times, targeting can be pinpointed at the individual target physician level. Understanding how the new and emerging communications channels work together…and with traditional media…is important to successfully achieving our clients' business goals. The need for media transparency, flexibility, accountability, and adjustability is paramount in the dynamic marketplace of today. And, we have worked hard to perfect the ability to adjust media programs as needed to capitalize on the feedback that is continually streamed back to us as programs are launched.