CDP Activation & Audience Planning

for a EU Pharmaceutical Client

How we turned an underused CDP into an audience planning tool that put data directly in the hands of brand teams.

The Challenge

The EU Regional team had already invested heavily in a Customer Data Platform, connecting CRM, web, and email data. On paper, the foundations were strong. In practice, brand teams couldn't use it. Documentation was overly technical, there was no clear path from data to audience to activation, and marketers had no visibility into what was actually available to them. The CDP was perceived as a cost centre, owned by IT, with leadership struggling to point to a tangible return.

What We Built

We bridged the gap between the technical depth of the CDP and the realities of brand strategy. We built brand-specific use cases that connected data attributes to actionable customer segments, translated complex documentation into a clear framework marketers could apply directly, and shifted the CDP into a true audience planning tool. From launch brands preparing to go to market to established products managing loss of exclusivity, the data was contextualised to support real brand decisions.

The Results

  • Marketers able to explore and size audiences in real time for the first time
  • Audience sizing directly driving content strategy and investment decisions
  • Consistent customer experience delivered across all channels from a single profile
  • CDP repositioned from IT cost centre to marketing platform
  • Regulatory-compliant segmentation supporting omnichannel orchestration at scale

“We worked with Forge on a data foundations project within the omnichannel space. The best way I can describe them is - they are an extremely safe pair of hands. They bring years of expertise from within the pharma industry as well as great domain-level expertise within the digital, data and omnichannel space. Pharma is a complicated space - despite this, they were able to navigate it effortlessly and with grace and really bring people along the way as they develop innovative strategies and solutions. If given the opportunity, I would definitely work with them again!”