Cadient Group

Could you briefly describe your company?

It’s AstraZeneca. We’re a pharmaceutical company that manufactures, markets, and distributes pharmaceutical products.

What is your position?

I’m one of the marketing managers.

Could you describe the business challenges that you were attempting to address with this project?

We needed additional support in terms of creative development, insights, and strategy towards promoting our products. That’s where we looked to Cadient. We do not have our own creative department in-house anymore due to downsizing. As such, we rely heavily on the agency of records to help us with our marketing, and also with creative development.

Could you describe the scope of the project? For example, did it involve custom design, development, training, or support?

The scope basically spans the gamut, both strategic and creative. Cadient handles everything from website to banner ads to emails. They provide everything from customized creative design, layout, and copy development, including: Medical-related type of messaging, references, and medical and legal review, and they actively participate in those type of meetings, consistently offering specialized counsel and ideas. Then also they participate in our planning and strategy work as well. Together, we collaborate on the direction we wish to take the Web presence, functionality and content, and then orchestrate it with another vendor that exclusively handles our development.

How did you select Cadient Group as your solution partner?

I’m not part of the original process for selecting Cadient. The retail team was already familiar with Cadient. From what I understand, the previous vendor did not perform well in terms of meeting our expectations and objectives, or the key performance values that we had set forth. If we feel that a service provider is not meeting our key performance indicators, then we begin to seek a replacement that can. We chose Cadient based on the services that they have done for other brands. They came highly recommended. For integration and efficiency purposes, too, they had an existing relationship with the retail team here at AstraZeneca.

Could you give a sense of the size of this project in monetary terms?

Our overall digital budget is $13 million. Cadient consumes approximately about three-fourths of that cumulative budget.  

When was this project completed?

The project remains ongoing and will continue into the near future. We are, however, scheduled to complete the current phase in December of 2013.

In terms of results, could you share any metrics or statistics might demonstrate the effectiveness of their work?

Based on our reporting, the content being created and pushed has seen a significant uptick. Our email marketing campaigns have been driving considerable traffic to the site. More importantly, Cadient has been able to craft and execute several independent marketing campaigns running in parallel. This has resulted in great feedback from our internal and external users. Cadient doesn’t provide a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather, they work closely with you to formulate several operational solutions.

How do you think that Cadient Group has performed overall on this project?

The Cadient team members that I work with currently are very professional. They’re very knowledgeable. They’re always there to help answer any questions, to help with the different vendors, to coordinate things as well and are always, to me, they’re very diligent with the work. They’re very responsive. I’m very impressed with their performance and with their services. I highly recommend them, especially the Cadient team that I’ve worked with. They are so much more than I could hope for.

In retrospect, are there any areas that you believe Cadient Group could improve on, or things that you might do differently as the client before approaching this type of project?

I can’t make any real recommendations on behalf of Cadient. They’ve performed extremely well with the work delegated to them. My only wish is that we could have a more integrated solution offered by a single vendor. From a project management perspective, it would have made our projects much easier to complete. For example, having to formulate new marketing initiatives from scratch, and then hand them off to a separate development agency can be very tiresome and complicated. It’s difficult to synchronize work from two distinct vendors, especially when there is minimal correspondence taking place between the two already. This challenge is to some extent our own, since we decided to source work from both and thus we’re responsible for managing both projects.