How AstraZeneca and Pfizer are Scaling Marketing Analytics for Success

The move towards enterprise analytics, particularly among the top 20 biopharma companies, is driven by several key benefits. Standardizing analytics leads to increased business velocity through faster insights and decision-making. It also fosters a common language and standardized reporting across the organization.

Mary Knoop, senior director, Veeva Crossix services, recently sat down with Kate Gattuso Duffy, global media analytics and optimization lead at Pfizer, and Will McMahon, director of omnichannel strategy at AstraZeneca, to discuss their journeys and benefits they are seeing in implementing marketing analytics across a portfolio of brands.

Common language and strategic alignment across brands

For both AstraZeneca and Pfizer, the impetus to standardize analytics came from a critical need for alignment. “We have a multifaceted business, with different types of products and different brand marketing teams to support,” says McMahon. “We need a common language and a standard way to measure performance.”

Gattuso Duffy echoed this sentiment, “When we’re having conversations cross-functionally, top-down, mid-level, bottom-up, it’s really important that we all speak the same language with a consistent and repeatable currency.”

This consistency is vital when communicating with leads of different therapeutic areas (e.g., primary care vs. rare disease) or other stakeholders. Gattuso Duffy highlighted a practical example — the TV upfronts. “By looking across all brands, our teams can have more strategic, large-scale partnership discussions based on what types of programming or specific streaming platforms are known to work across the portfolio,” she says.

Structuring for success with centralized expertise

Both companies have developed specialized teams to manage enterprise-wide analytics. AstraZeneca has a centralized omnichannel center of excellence, with leads embedded directly with the brands. “This structure builds trust and credibility,” McMahon says. “It also ensures that the centralized function isn’t just pushing down performance reports, but truly understands and applies data at the brand level.” Overarching therapeutic area leads focus on the holistic view, identifying media investments that can benefit all brands.

Pfizer, having established a centralized marketing organization under a CMO about two years ago, also took a thoughtful approach to building its media analytics function. Gattuso Duffy’s team includes centralized resources for data strategy and audience analytics, complemented by functional teams aligned by product or therapeutic area (TA). These TA-aligned teams understand the nuances of specific products, competitors, and payer landscapes, acting as “captains of integrated reporting” working cross-functionally with the CMO, brands, Crossix, and agency partners.

Implementation: Communication, education, and change management

Bringing enterprise analytics to fruition involves significant change management. Though many AstraZeneca brands were already using Crossix, the process involved setting clear expectations, defining the standardized offering (which still allows for different engagement levels based on brand size and seasonality), and managing the transition for brands using other solutions or no solution at all.

Pfizer’s approach heavily emphasized communication and education. A critical step was extensive upfront training. Over 200 marketers joined a training given by Crossix while the system was being set up. This allowed the team to ask questions and to discuss objectives openly. Gattuso Duffy says, “Standardization doesn’t mean rigid uniformity; it’s about establishing standards that still allow for custom measurement plans and bespoke reporting within a standard KPI framework.”

Opportunities and innovation

The impact of standardized analytics extends beyond efficiency. It fuels new opportunities and has allowed both organizations to focus on more strategic decision-making. McMahon notes, “Standardization has helped prioritize efforts by eliminating competing sources of truth, allowing teams to focus on higher-value activities.” For AstraZeneca, this has facilitated an evolved portfolio strategy, especially in therapeutic areas like respiratory, where multiple brands target similar patient and physician populations. “The speed of insights now gives us the ability to optimize media campaigns faster than we could previously,” he says.

For organizations considering enterprise-wide analytics, Gattuso Duffy stresses, “Be open to feedback, manage the ‘what’s in it for me’ for all stakeholders, and understand the importance of change management.” McMahon advises finding champions within the organization and, critically, “Don’t wait for someone else to do it — get started yesterday.”

Implementing enterprise-wide marketing analytics is a significant undertaking, but as Pfizer and AstraZeneca demonstrate, the rewards — enhanced speed, strategic alignment, improved efficiency, and deeper insights — are transformative for navigating the complexities of modern pharmaceutical marketing.

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