Pharmaceutical Market Europe • January 2022 • 34
IN ASSOCIATION WITH PURPLE AGENCY
Home or away: where next for pharmaceutical symposia?
By Nick Burgoyne
Even beyond the pandemic, you’d be forgiven for asking why on earth anyone would want to go back to large-scale, in-person congresses. Equally, you wouldn’t take exception to anyone who craved the community buzz of such live events. Despite advances in communication technology, nothing beats the real thing. Or does it?
The same can be asked of sports fans. In the past, if you wanted to watch a sporting event, you had to travel to a stadium. If you were there, you were one of the lucky few. Otherwise, you’d have to read about it second-hand in the news.
The arrival of live TV opened up sports to the masses, giving everyone a piece of the action. This was great for the diehard fans too, but it wouldn’t dissuade them from experiencing the thrill of in-person spectating.
Something for everyone
The reality is that one size does not fit all. Nowadays we’re happy to digest sports information through live TV, on-demand viewing, apps, social media or a combination of all four. You wouldn’t go back to TV-only access, to enrich the experience of some fans at the expense of others. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to disenfranchise a large proportion of your congress audience simply because they can’t attend due to time, money or venue capacity limitations.
No longer tied by location or time zone, virtual conferences and symposia are a great way to make medical information available to all. However, some of the details and experiences are often lacking when compared to in-person events. So, why risk hamstringing scientific awareness when you no longer have to?
There are many ways to avoid this – here are three to kick us off:
1. Make it available on their terms
With doctors being more time-poor than ever before, it’s important to engage with them on their own terms. This engagement could take the form of extra digital content, or a blend of on-demand and live viewing to fit around their schedule.
Doctors are more likely to participate in recorded, on-demand events, since they have a chance to review the facts – the same way football fans replay their favourite goals.
Also, by increasing event accessibility and convenience, you can catch a wider audience. Anecdotally, we hear that up to 50% of virtual symposium sign-ups drop out on the day. You can either spend more time and money on keeping them to their time slot or you can simply make the information more available.
2. Provide everything to everyone (within reason)
Curating, tagging and indexing congress information makes it quicker and easier for people to find what they need.
Like sports fans, doctors don’t want the same edited highlights as everyone else. Equally, they don’t need every detail in chronological order. For example, very few people watch the Olympics in a linear fashion.
By providing this ‘value-added’ service to both virtual and in-person congress attendees, you also create opportunities for deeper engagement beyond the event itself.
3. Avoid two-tier
information sharing
Some will always attach more kudos to in-person attendance. And second-hand news is less engaging than first-hand information. It’s crucial, therefore, that you make the virtual experience as similar as possible to the physical one. But how do you approach information sharing when your audience isn’t on the same playing field?
While virtual content can easily be shared between users, recreating the physical and social connections necessary for disseminating information organically can be harder to achieve.
One option might be to create ‘buddy groups’ based on shared characteristics, similar to the way dating apps work. There is clearly some innovative work to be done in this area, but the technical opportunities are there to reach and engage a wider medical community, whether attending events virtually or in person.
The final score
The way symposia are run has changed. No longer constrained by distance, virtual meetings extend the reach of medical awareness while providing audiences with content on their own terms. Although we cannot match the excitement ‘gold’ of being there in person, there is no reason why online congresses cannot claim a podium finish. We have the technology to make it richer – all we need is the commitment to bring it home.
‘The technical opportunities are there to reach and engage a wider medical community, whether attending events virtually or in person’
Nick Burgoyne is
International Client Services Director at Purple Agency