Novo Nordisk Produces Assets 4x Faster with Modular Content

In 2018, Novo Nordisk faced an opportunity and an equally large obstacle. The Danish pharmaceutical company, which is focused on treating and curing diabetes, rare bleeding and growth hormone disorders, and obesity, had a rapidly expanding pipeline, which meant that demand for content to support commercialization was also going to expand. The prospect of a threefold increase in the cost of content production and increased use of an already cumbersome review and approval process, compelled Novo Nordisk to look for a way to handle the growth. It chose Veeva Vault PromoMats to be its digital asset management system and set out to transform its approach to content creation.

“We knew what we wanted to change,” says Alejandra Betancourt, global director for Marketing Operations at Novo Nordisk “and a partnership with Veeva around modular content helped get us to that change. ”

Content need swells, budget can’t

Novo Nordisk needed to rethink the way it approached content production. Its old systems could not scale and its review and approval process was time-consuming and unwieldy. It also had a network of 1,500 agencies creating content for its global and local needs but its systems made collaboration with them difficult.

The Novo Nordisk team knew that they wouldn’t get a budget increase to match the expected growth in content. Being familiar with Vault PromoMats from previous experience the team thought that it could use it to speed up the production and review of content at Novo Nordisk, as well as create assets that could easily be reused in other materials. The team brought Vault PromoMats into Novo Nordisk and, in the process, helped Veeva to create a new industry standard for using modular content.

Modular assets, streamlined reviews, greater reuse

Novo Nordisk began with three brands and defined a new approach to content for healthcare professionals (HCPs), grounded in transparency, efficiency, agility, and insights. Each paragraph of text or graphic element can be stored in Vault PromoMats with its associated reviews and approvals as a discrete module so that when the module is used to create a new asset, it may not need to go through a full review.

“Because everything is properly grouped, we can have an optimized MLR review for some content pieces,” says Betancourt. “Our reviewers love the time savings.”

The company has found that the modular system allows content creators to stay true to the brand across markets, but be creative at the same time. Global content can be localized much faster than before. Content reuse, which was almost nonexistent before Novo Nordisk embraced modular content, is now at 40% and expected to grow significantly.

Betancourt says that the team got buy-in for each aspect of the change by asking questions around pain points, like long production and review times, as well as the lack of visibility into local execution of global strategies, and then talking about how that could be different with Vault PromoMats. “My experience,” she says, “is that people come around because they see the benefit.”

And while some companies may be drawn to custom solutions, Novo Nordisk saw benefit in working with Veeva’s best practice tools. “ We didn’t need to develop proprietary tools because Veeva’s solution was very close to what we wanted to do,” she says. We got a head start without significant investment.”

Novo Nordisk’s success with Veeva Vault PromoMats

• With Vault PromoMats, Novo Nordisk grew its content asset output to 31,000 pieces from 5,000.
• Uniform, global content standards improved the quality of all assets.
• The company now has complete visibility into what content is being produced and whether it is working.
• A leaner review and approval process for some assets cut the overall review time in half.
• The expected annual review time savings will be equal to 5,000 workweeks annually.
• Novo Nordisk is now able to track content from creation to reuse, with full customer experience insights on all digital channels.
• All Novo Nordisk brands will be using modular content by the end of 2022.

“We didn’t need to develop proprietary tools because Veeva’s solution was very close to what we wanted to do. We got a head start without significant investment.” — Alejandra Betancourt, global director for Marketing Operations, Novo Nordisk

More content with room to scale

In just two years, Novo Nordisk has quintupled the amount of content it puts out, while slashing the number of days needed to create an asset to 23 from 104 and getting assets through review four times faster. That means that Novo Nordisk marketers now have the bandwidth to tackle even more content requests.

Vault PromoMats is also helping Novo Nordisk to collaborate more efficiently with its 1,500 agencies. The company now has complete visibility into what content is being produced and whether it is working. Novo Nordisk intends to expand the use of modular content to all brands in the next year.

“When people from the industry ask me what they should do,” Betancourt says, “I say that you need to have a clear picture of what you want to change and the building blocks to make that happen.”

“We knew what we wanted to change and a partnership with Veeva around modular content helped get us to that change.” — Alejandra Betancourt, global director for Marketing Operations, Novo Nordisk