Bristol Myers Squibb Creates the Ultimate Omnichannel Experience for Health Care Providers

The mission of the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb is to discover, develop, and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases. Reaching Health Care Providers (HCPs) in the right place, at the right time, with the correct information is critical to the success of this mission.

For BMS, having the ability to track the customer journey across differentiated strategies meant they needed a better way of tracking the many ongoing marketing efforts. Analytics teams ultimately needed access to more data of better quality, and marketing teams needed more information of better reliability. Executives were also looking to plan for new data privacy compliance laws going into effect for their international markets. It was apparent the time had come to expand the ways in which they were capturing metadata and how they were managing that captured data — creating data standards internally.

BMS partnered with Claravine in 2017, knowing The Data Standards Cloud platform would serve as a centralized repository for digital campaigns, reduce the time for data analysis, and grow with their business needs. Beginning a complete overhaul of media tracking efforts, they hired Digital Media Operations Consultant Tim Scales to lead the charge with the strategic global implementation of the platform.

The Challenge: UTM Codes in Excel, on the Cusp of GDPR

When BMS came to Claravine, they were managing and creating their UTM codes in Excel files that were passed between teams for manual inputs. Then, using an engineered concatenate function to tie it all together, a UTM code was generated. “There was no quality control, security, automation, or scalability, coupled with a wide margin of error,” said Tim. This ultimately led to the data analytics teams spending more billable hours attempting to solve data-related issues downstream instead of making strategic analyses.

Coupled with the global marketing teams being on the cusp of the GDPR mandate, it was becoming mission critical for BMS to get a grasp on their data management and evolve their campaign strategies. Selecting Claravine, and implementing this enterprise-wide change, would require a fundamental mindset shift — and that became Tim’s ultimate mission. He quickly got to work de-siloing teams, overhauling the media operations process, and creating data integrity for all of BMS.

The Solution: Metadata Baked Into Tracking Codes from the Start

Tim took a hands-on approach to using The Data Standards Cloud platform to deeply understand the functionality, use-case implementation per team, and integrations for downstream analysis. Onboarding with Claravine brings each marketing team — emails, search, social, display — into the conversation at setup. The goal is to identify key data points for measuring campaign success and centralize the input process, so that each team can bake their necessary metadata parameters into the tracking codes from the start.

In the early phases of onboarding, the BMS team became a valued partner to the Claravine team when Tim raised his hand to collaborate as a beta tester. By outlining pain points in current processes, providing functional feedback, and helping with in-platform testing, Tim and the team were pivotal to the development of the Bulk Upload function within the platform today. The third-party agency responsible for BMS’s search engine marketing efforts immediately saw the benefits: “Being able to upload 20K rows of marketing data at any one given point of time was game-changing for that team. Not only is it going to track all the assets at the level of granularity needed, but it can be done in a scalable, repeatable, secure, form and fashion,” says Tim.

Another favorite feature is the CID tracking parameter. The Claravine CID code allows marketers to append infinite pieces of metadata into one CID code, which is then used as a singular UTM parameter within the URL — campaign name, channel, brand, product, target audience, methodology, the strategic objective tied to a campaign — without making the URL a mile long, with uploads automated into AWS S3 delivering near real-time data to the team.

Additionally, the international teams in Germany have seen success leveraging the QR code integration, using Claravine to integrate with marketing styles in different regions seamlessly and expand BMS’s data integrity efforts into all of its markets.

The Results: $1.5M Saved and a True Omnichannel View

“In the early phases of using The Data Standards Cloud and working with the Claravine team, BMS quickly felt the positive impacts of time being saved and speed gained,” said Tim. The platform immediately allowed teams to cut down the time needed to create data inputs, and the automation and error reduction provided peace of mind for submitters. Instead of asking “was the campaign successful?”, BMS is now asking “what does the data look like?” — with full confidence that analytics has the correct data to provide an answer.

The value showed up on the bottom line with BMS’s acquisition of TurnPoint Therapeutics. The newly added team brought new data, new processes, and their own tracking management tool; the back and forth between that tool and manual inputs put marketing timelines at risk. Within a month, Tim was able to prove the value of standardizing data through Claravine — saving BMS $1.5 million in platform consolidation alone.

Now, with quality data inputs, BMS can contextualize quantitative web metrics with qualitative metadata. The implementation of The Data Standards Cloud across BMS teams has helped develop the ultimate omnichannel experience for HCPs — allowing teams to get a holistic view of a user’s journey within a campaign, so the next time they can be more informed, smarter, and more successful in delivering messages that matter.

We’ve been able to track all our links seamlessly, across all our digital marketing channels, and hit that ultimate goal of an omnichannel experience. We are able to track our users across devices, and across platforms, and provide the best experience that we can for our HCPs.

About Tim Scales

Tim Scales is the Digital Media Operations consultant at Bristol Myers Squibb, charged with leading out the global implementation and strategic vision for all media tracking efforts. Working cross-collaboratively to wrangle the data silos within BMS, Tim has successfully chartered a cohesive data strategy across BMS’s marketing teams. A problem-solver by nature, Tim’s hands-on approach helped him in identifying his team’s data attributes and led to the standardization of their inputs. With the completed rollout of Claravine, BMS is now able to track all digital links across all channels, ultimately creating a true omnichannel experience for its patrons.