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Millennial Media Opps: Novartis taps media AOR after promoting CMO (Score 60)

Pharmaceutical corporation Epsilon, NovartisONE2 now handles media planning, media buying and planning, as well as data and analytics. The shift adds Epsilon to Novartis's roster; Starcom was the incumbent.

This review comes after Novartis named Gail Horwood as its US chief marketing and customer experience officer in November 2021. Horwood joined the company in June 2021 as chief experience officer and digital customer engagement head. This shows that Horwood's been doing well with the digital customer engagement, which means that such efforts will continue and that spend will continue rising (more below).

This wasn't Novartis's only recent leadership change; in January 2022, the company appointed Jonathan Macone as marketing operations director. Macone was most recently the director and head of Samsung Electronics's integrated marketing performance.

According to iSpot, Novartis hasn't invested in national TV since allocating approximately $3.1k at the very beginning of 2021.

So far this year, Pathmatics reports the company has spent roughly $17.6m on digital ads, 35% more than the roughly $13m it spent within the past 12 months. In 2021, Novartis's estimated full-year spend increased 7% to $65.7m from that of $61.5m in 2020. It has earned ~1.3b digital impressions YTD via desktop video (68%), Facebook (21%), Instagram (7%), desktop display (2%) and Twitter (1%) ads. Most of this year's desktop video ads have been placed site direct onto destinations such as youtube.com (88%), craigslist.org, cnn.com, yahoo.com and finance.yahoo.com.

Additionally, Magellan shows Novartis has aired around 107 podcast ads within the past 12 months.

Right now, the company seems to be most primarily targeting millennials. Sellers able to offer high-ROI strategies should get in touch soon to secure some of these increasing ad dollars. Per Kantar data, Novartis also utilizes OOH, print, radio and local broadcast.

Agency & martech readers - As you know, reviews often follow one another, especially when they also follow CMO appointments. Reach out sooner rather than later to offer PR, creative, social media management and/or digital analytics services. Novartis currently works with digital AOR Ruder Finn.