Out to Launch 7-1-2007

On a Tuesday afternoon in April, after a final makeup and wardrobe check, Philip Elias took his seat beneath the glowing lights at the WQED studio in Pittsburgh. Elias, CEO and executive producer of Velocity Broadcasting, along with Thomas Baldwin, president and CEO of Chicago-based Morton’s Restaurant Group, and others, had assembled in the studio to talk about the private satellite-broadcasting network that they had built into nearly 70 Morton’s The Steakhouse restaurants across the country. The panel’s mediator, local news anchor Darieth Chisholm, took her mark in front of the cameras and waited for the director to signal that she was on the air.

Just after 2 p.m., with a flourish of music and graphics, Chisholm’s image appeared in high definition on nine-foot screens inside the boardrooms of Morton’s restaurants nationwide. A total of 600 attendees, snacking on hors d’oeuvres, watched and listened as Chis-holm’s voice resonated in surround sound, introducing the afternoon’s agenda. Over the course of the subsequent hour, the panelists extolled the virtues of satellite broadcasting as an innovative communications tool for meeting planners. For a few minutes, before the live transmission ceased, the panelists entertained questions from attendees, who called in on their cell phones from coast to coast.

When Pittsburgh-based Velocity first beamed a satellite feed to a Morton’s boardroom in 2005, it joined the ranks of several other satellite technology companies that offer broadcast services directly to meeting planners.

“It’s such a great way to get the message out to such a large audience on one night,” says Jennifer Bruinooge, senior manager of meetings operations for ProActive Marketing Group, based in Upper Saddle River, N.J., which produced its first Velocity broadcast in June for a pharmaceutical client.

The appeal of the technology, which is more robust than traditional video-conferencing, is that planners can broadcast visually and aurally engaging presentations, often from key opinion leaders in their fields, to vast, geographically diverse audiences -- at hotels or restaurants or wherever screens can be set up and satellite downlinks established -- without requiring the attendees or the presenters to travel to a single meeting spot.

This has been a coup to meeting planners and marketing managers in several industries, particularly the medical and pharmaceutical fields. New drug launches, clinical research presentations and continuing medical education programs demand fast and broad dissemination of a consistent, often tightly regulated, message and are enhanced greatly by personal appearances from top physicians or researchers.

Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies have launched a new product or presented new research about drugs by hosting a series of dinner meetings for physicians throughout the country, which can take months to complete and which some planners say have lost appeal in recent years. “It’s hard to get [doctors] to come to local dinner meetings anymore,” Bruinooge says. Satellite company executives believe that their events offer a cachet that local, one-off meetings can’t provide -- the thrill of participating in a live, nationwide event -- and thus are more likely to entice physicians to attend.

Producing an effective broadcast -- essentially a TV-quality talk show and a multiple-site meeting across several time zones simultaneously -- is a challenge. “It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid, as opposed to tugging at it,” says Mark T. Luckie, marketing associate for Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co., a pharmaceutical firm that has produced broadcasts with Rosemont, Ill.-based Eventcom International, a division of Marriott. Eventcom’s satellite product, LaunchStar, was created largely to cater to the pharmaceutical industry.

Changing technology

Thanks in part to the digital satellite explosion in the late 1990s, which shrank both the cost and size of dishes, the technology is rapidly improving, and the support for broadcasts is broadening.

Now, companies are offering clients more ways to make the broadcasts interactive, patching in live telephone calls, accepting questions via fax, e-mail or text message, and providing attendees with audience-response systems, such as wireless keypad devices, that allow them to interact with presenters in real time.

The broadcasts can be streamed on the web or delivered to a dial-in phone service that allows listeners to hear the presentation from any phone, both as a way to reach new attendees or as a back-up system to the potentially tenuous satellite feed. Companies can archive the material online or burn it on DVDs to be included in future sales kits.

The satellite companies also offer a variety of post-broadcast services, from collating unanswered questions to conducting feedback surveys to, in the case of Eventcom, tracking physicians’ prescriptions to determine if the event changed their behavior.

Each company offers slightly different services with its broadcast package, but, for a price, each can closely approximate what the others provide.

One difference among satellite providers is the type and location of viewing venues they typically employ. Velocity is unique in having built-in infrastructure at Morton’s restaurants; most have to set up screens and downlinks at different venues, normally hotel meeting rooms, for each broadcast.

Other variables include the quality of the image; the kind of backup system used, if any, in case a satellite link can’t be established; the level of on-site support, and the extent of post-broadcast services. Velocity and Eventcom offer one point of contact for the entire event; others require planners to juggle more on their own.

Live from Pittsburgh:
Velocity broadcasts
to Morton’s steak houses.

Challenges remain

Despite advances in technology, broadcasts still don’t offer attendees direct interaction with the industry experts.

“Let’s face it. If I could put [hematology and oncology expert] Bruce Chesson in front of 3,000 people, that might be better, face-to-face,” says Kurt Janson, principal of Dayton, Ohio-based Celerity Healthcare, Velocity’s pharmaceutical marketing partner. “The next best thing is to put him in this kind of forum.”

If planners are not careful, attendees at the remote locations might feel slighted because the high-powered presenters didn’t take the time to travel to their market to meet with them, warns Bobby Cord, vice president of operations for Perspective Communications Group Inc., a Middletown, R.I.-based video and communications company with satellite-broadcasting capabilities. “The key is to make the local event particular to that location,” he says.

That means having a special local speaker -- who must be paid an honorarium -- to greet attendees and answer lingering questions after the broadcast, adding to the total cost of the event. “It’s not cheap,” admits Lilly’s Luckie, whose two most recent events drew 8,000 and 6,000 people, respectively. Still, Luckie felt he got a return on his investment. “If we didn’t feel there was value, we wouldn’t have done it,” he says.

While everything’s negotiable, Velocity charges a $2,850 fee per restaurant, not including catering, extra on-site staff or any video production costs. Russell Rice, president of Velocity, says because his company has built-in infrastructure, those rates compare favorably with competitors’. Other companies said their rates were too varied to discuss in detail.

Another challenge is taking full advantage of the medium; in other words, not simply broadcasting a slide show when the technology is capable of much more. “Our biggest challenge is the lack of creativity on the pharma side,” says Janson, whose company has helped produce 10 broadcasts to date and has twice that many future events booked. He works closely with pharmaceutical clients to ensure that they incorporate prerecorded scripted scenes with actors, video montages, animation or graphics, in addition to the spoken word.

Seeing results

Pharmaceutical companies go to great lengths to produce informative written material about their drugs, but Luckie says he’s never sure people take the time to read it.

“In any industry, it takes six or seven times for a message to really sink into any customer,” concurs Tom Cavanaugh, director of marketing for Summit, N.J.-based Celgene Corp., a biopharmaceutical company. Cavanaugh used Velocity to help launch Revlimid, a drug that treats patients with certain kinds of cancer. “Going into it, many of us were extremely nervous about technology glitches,” he recalls. But the execution was nearly flawless, and the campaign helped Revlimid become the highest-revenue-producing hematology/oncology therapeutic on record in its first year subsequent to launch, he says.

Broadcasts seem to capture the attention of attendees in ways other mediums don’t. Thomas Maguire, CMP, director of Eventcom, says it’s not uncommon to discover later that doctors who attended product launch broadcasts are prescribing the drugs two, three or four times as much as doctors who didn’t. “That’s the power of the offering,” he says.