When Reports aren't enough: Is your data working for you?

Pharma marketers aren’t short on third-party media and advertising data. For this client, the challenge wasn’t access, it was that the data structure didn’t serve the needs of the business. Ad servers, DSPs, and publishers were feeding back activity data, but the way it was organised left gaps that limited its value.

The result: plenty of data, but little ability to translate it into meaningful business insight. 

The breakthrough came with a decision to establish a clear data strategy. By defining how third-party data should be structured, enriched, and connected to brand objectives, the client shifted from passively receiving information to actively shaping the insights that would drive marketing and investment decisions.

Which creative was actually working and with whom? What looked like a reporting issue soon revealed something broader: the company didn’t own the insights it needed to optimise.

When Reports Fall Short 

They knew where ads were served, but had no visibility into how different messages actually landed. Creative-level data wasn’t being ingested, and without a taxonomy to label content consistently, results from each partner came back fragmented and impossible to compare. 

This wasn’t a new challenge. The company had already tried three times to build a creative taxonomy, each attempt collapsing under its own complexity. 

The Cost of Inaction 

Over time, leadership began to ask what that blind spot was costing. 

Better visibility into creative performance could mean reducing wasted media spend, improving engagement with healthcare professionals, sharpening targeting, and laying the groundwork for optimisation at scale. 

A Leaner Way Forward 

When Forge DC was brought in, the focus wasn’t on building another heavyweight framework. It was on creating a lean, incremental, and practical solution that marketers could actually use.

Step one was a content taxonomy, a clear structure for labelling creative assets so every variation could be tied back to the journeys and campaigns it supported. 

Step two was an efficient tagging workflow and tracking approach, ensuring that all interactions could be enriched with taxonomy metadata.

Step three was restructuring and ingesting creative-level performance data directly from the ad server, enabling automated reporting on a standardised omnichannel dataset.

Together, these steps allowed the company to move from passively relying on partner data to actively owning a dataset built for insight, reducing cost, accelerating reporting, and shortening the time from data to decisions to action. 

What Leaders Should Take Away 

More than a century ago, retailer John Wanamaker remarked: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

For pharma marketers, that line still feels all too familiar. But the tools to move beyond it already exist. if companies are willing to take ownership of their data and build data strategies designed for the realities of modern marketing.

Partners and platforms will always provide part of the picture. But real competitive advantage comes from building datasets that work for you.

And as this case shows, transformation doesn’t always mean a massive overhaul. Often, the real impact comes from small, practical steps that build momentum over time. At Forge DC, we believe in incremental solutions that make the most of what you already have, rather than starting again from scratch.

So, here’s the question we left this client with and the one we’ll leave you with too:

Is your data working for you?

The insights that could change your performance may already be there, just waiting to be unlocked.

About Forge DC 

Forge DC is a data strategy consultancy that helps pharmaceutical companies turn complexity into clarity. We bridge the gap between technology, data and brand strategy, ensuring data works for marketers, not the other way around. From building lean, practical solutions to enabling scalable customer engagement, we focus on making the most of what you already have to deliver measurable impact.

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