Gilead's Sue Morelli and Initiative's Jen Dass on maximizing the success of data-driven audience targeting

The spray-and-pray era of marketing is long gone. Thanks to an ever-growing trove of consumer data, marketers can now reach the right person at the right time on the right device.

Yet, as digital breadcrumbs multiply, data alone is no longer enough — strategic thinking is essential to finding niche audiences and driving meaningful results.

To explore the evolution of data-driven audience targeting, The Current brought together Sue Morelli, senior director of media strategy and operations at biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, and Jen Dass, chief transformation officer at media agency Initiative. Over the past six months, they’ve collaborated to connect potential patients with Gilead’s therapies.

Their insights underscore a critical truth: Success depends on more than just information — it requires clear business goals, the right questions, and, most importantly, a strong client-agency partnership. Or, as Dass puts it, having pristine data is great, but having a pristine partnership is critical.

Sue Morelli: One of the things we kept coming up against is how can we make our analytics more robust and more meaningful? That’s the work we have been embarking on for the past six months.

Jen Dass: Any marketer has to think about analytics and data throughout that life cycle of media and marketing because it has to fuel everything. How can we be that enablement arm to help with those business decisions? And analytics and data are really a core part of that.

Morelli: How can we also get that team to work smarter, maybe not harder, in what they’re delivering to our brands? How can we make it more insight-driven and not a 100-page deck? We can do something really meaningful in an executive summary format that gives our brand marketing teams the ability to make well-informed decisions quickly.

Dass: Whether it’s our internal teams or when we’re speaking with clients like Sue, having the lens of what is the impact, what’s the driver, what’s the recommendation? I cannot tell you how many times over the past 20 years I’ve had to say that, but so many times we look at those 100-page reports and we see this thing went up 4% period over period. Great…

Morelli: But what does that mean?

Dass: Exactly.

Morelli: Why should we care about that?

Dass: And is it in service of whatever the business goals and business questions are? The first thing we talk about is what are the business questions that we’re trying to answer and then laddering everything back up to those.

Morelli: A lot of brands, not just Gilead, are active in this advertising space, so how can we make sure those advertising dollars are in service of driving business goals, whatever they may be?

Dass: I’m going to say something super controversial.

Morelli: Oh, I love it.

Dass: As media professionals, we sometimes forget that media agencies [the ones responsible for buying and selling ads] are only 5% of what marketers think about day-to-day. They have to think about how they’re showing up organically as well as with paid media. What are the regulations that they need to overcome for specific indications or drugs, particularly within pharma?

Having pristine — and this is why I said it’s going to be controversial — data is great. That’s the baseline. But having pristine client services and a pristine partnership is going to be super critical moving forward, especially in today’s age of AI and moving things faster to market.

We’re at the point now, if I have something candid to tell Sue, I just say, “Hey, this is what I have to say. Let’s talk about it.” And you can’t have those candid conversations without trust.

Morelli: I actually don’t think that’s controversial at all. We spend so much time at work. I value having strong partnerships with anyone that I work with because it makes the time easier, and I want to say more fun.

There’s so much data out there now. Year over year, it becomes even more fragmented from the different channels, the targeting capabilities, privacy and how you have to reach certain audiences. Having experts at the agency to help comb through all this data is important. Getting a spreadsheet means nothing to me. What is the context around it? Having a partnership that is a trusted relationship is what I value most. It creates an ease of back-and-forth on what we need to accomplish together, like sifting through the chaos that you get with data.

Dass: How do we as good partners take all that data and really synthesize what’s meaningful and bring forward that impact-driver-recommendation-type format to say, “This is what we’re seeing”? Where should we be working with The Trade Desk to infuse some of the data that we now have to build custom algorithms or decision trees or things of that nature to make us smarter in a more agile way?

Morelli: The Trade Desk has been a good partner to Gilead and IPG as a whole. Especially for Gilead, with a lot of our audience groups, they’re not necessarily the general population. We want to reach some underserved populations, especially within the HIV space, where partnering with someone like The Trade Desk helps us go to these little corners of the world and ensure we’re messaging them at the appropriate time with the right message to help pull them through our patient journeys.

When you’re looking at underserved populations, you have to think a bit more creatively because the success metric will be slightly different, and they have a slower patient journey. And so that has been really important in our partnership with the agency on formulating those plans to make sure we are also laddering up to our leadership that we are moving the needle in a meaningful way, we are reaching these audiences and they are learning more about what they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their health care.

Dass: I completely agree. I think particularly around BIPOC audiences, there’s research, but also from personal experience, BIPOC audiences don’t go to the doctor as frequently as they should.

Morelli: Not all messaging is created equal either, and how you would message one group isn’t the same as how you would message another group. So you really have to take that into consideration as well. Especially in advertising, your messaging is half your performance. So that is a really big initiative as well. They’re being inundated every day on their phone, on TV, outside on the street. What type of message resonates with them on their journey?

Dass: And how do we make sure we’re informing them by using all the data signals that we can to get to that place of trust and, therefore, doctor visitation?

Over the last 18 months, we’ve built a custom survey across both patient and physicians that allows us to infuse data into our audiences and, therefore, allows us to be a bit more custom and prescriptive, no pun intended, as we think about audience segmentation and activation.

Morelli: We were talking about our vision for this analytics workstream and having data-driven insights, and I said, “That’s great, we need to have that, but you also have to think of the context around it. What are the other nuances that the data isn’t showcasing?” And you mentioned it at the beginning, relationships come into huge play here because we need someone on the other side that has strategic knowledge that can put that context on the data. Because data will tell you one thing, but there might be something else that we need to consider to have that full picture.

Dass: I cannot tell you how many times an MMM comes back and says, “You shouldn’t invest in online video because it’s too expensive and not efficient.” And I say, “That’s great from a regression analysis perspective, but we know we need to invest in video.” Or there’s an emerging media tactic or something happening at a macroeconomic level that we need to account for. Data is the foundation, but we still need strategic thinking to continue to evolve to drive results.

Morelli: What are you most looking forward to in 2025?

Dass: Continuing to build the relationships that we’ve started and growing those to be even stronger than they are today is very much at the top of my list. I look forward to, hopefully, at this time next year, being able to see those quick hits on what are the business questions and outcomes? How are we driving those and optimizing those from a results perspective?

But also, what are the new strategies we’re thinking about? How are we innovating beyond what we’re currently doing? How are we helping patients and bringing them closer to their physicians and their personal care? And then we can go from data, data, data to results, results, results.

Morelli: Exactly.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.