Empowering Patients and Communicating Purpose: A Conversation with Amy Atwood

Welcome to Frictionless Marketing, where we explore the latest

trends and challenges in the world of marketing and beyond. . Today we're joined by Amy Atwood, Vice President of Regional Communication and Philanthropy at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. With over 25 years in corporate communications, Amy has championed transparency, authenticity, and the integration of patient perspectives throughout her career. Her journey from roles at Sanofi to her current leadership at Takeda, reflects a commitment to empowering individuals through clear, timely communication.

Today we'll explore Amy's insights on the evolving pharmaceutical industry, her advice for budding communications professionals and her perspective on purpose-driven work, diversity, equity, inclusion, and the impact of augmented intelligence and communication strategies. Join us as we delve into these pivotal topics. Live from fierce pharma, PR and Comm Summit East with Amy Atwood. Amy, thank you so much for joining us.

We've now just completely wrapped the last session at the Fierce Pharma PR Communications Summit East.

I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts in this show. Specifically, what we're gonna do is just recap for our listeners what they missed by not being here, what the key themes of the conference were, any important takeaways, and just general learnings and conversations that happened here. So thank you for agreeing to be on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Paul. This has been such an energizing, inspiring two days. It was really jam-packed.

Going from 9:00 AM until 6:00 PM with sometimes two tracks at the same time. So there was a lot of information to absorb. There was, and a lot of very different topics covered.

And then also some themes that definitely came up repeatedly. Obviously, AI was a big topic in many different ways, but what else, what other themes emerged for you? It was really interesting because, like you said, there were some things that came up over and over again. Transparency, if I had a dime for every time we said we need to be transparent in our communications and our planning and everything that we're doing. Authenticity. AI over and over again. Human-centric.

I think think the fact that corporations' voices have evolved over time, and that really goes back to the title of this conference was driving the next evolution, igniting innovation, powering impact, and the way that we're going to be. We have been evolving. I've been in this industry almost thirty years, and when I think back to some of the ways that we did things and actually having to learn a corporate voice that was almost computer-like.

And now we are the opposite and we're trying to get our leaders to be humans. [Paul laughs] That's one of the things that people really spoke about over and over. Yeah. But I hadn't put it in that context in my own mind of juxtaposing with many of these corporate leaders, they also grew up in an environment where they were taught to roboticize themselves, largely because they were speaking to institutional audiences.

Now, of course, through consumerization, both in the patient side of what we do as well as the role of pharmaceutical industry in the larger societal discourse, and retail investors. It's like, oh my gosh, we actually have to talk to people again. And we have to talk about people. Another theme that there were multiple sessions on was storytelling, or, as you were saying, story making.

We need to really make sure that we're always, in our industry, putting patients at the center and telling the stories of those patients and those people in that - going back to it - authentic, transparent way that can resonate.

Another theme that came up again and again, actually two different distinct themes that people often tie together. So I actually feel a little bad saying them in the same breath, but health equity - I'll pause - and DENI. And making sure that we are, how we're telling our stories, and ensuring that our patients can get access. Mm-Hmm.

And how we are making sure that a patient sees themselves in the stories that we're telling so that we are finding patients from all walks of life and all types of patients so that we can be using those examples for others. Yeah, and there was a great quote, and I know he was borrowing it from somebody else, but Sri Ramaswami from GSK was the one who said, "You can't be what you can't see." Which I thought was a really great quote in this area.

And then of course, he led the panel where Tiffany West at Gilead really had an incredible story about the health equity journey there from sort of moving out of the foundation and being like a little bit of the frosting on the cake instead of the cake into this is now central to the business. Of course, that's I guess where we would all aspire to this work landing, even though oftentimes it seems to be a little bit of a difficult road to get there.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I heard repeatedly when we were talking in different sessions about health equity is making sure that it's not transactional. That it's consistent and that it's embedded in the business. And that really brings to mind the importance of us as communicators being business leaders. We are not a support function. We are not simply enabling others. We are strategists. We are thought partners. We are advisors.

And that is included in the health equity space as well.

Yeah, and there's definitely a noticeable difference when you, picking up that thread, between people saying communications was consulted after a decision was made. That's our worst. Right. Or, communications was asked to communicate about a decision that was made. Moving first into communications was asked what will be the communications impact of this decision? To now, finally, sounds like some people are being asked what will be the business impact of this decision?

And that just points to the centrality of communications in everything we do these days. Absolutely. I think it's that making sure that we're tying our communications to business outcomes is so critical. Another thing that came up repeatedly in different sessions of all different topics was communications having a seat at the table. And I loved one of the speakers talking about how she invited herself and how she doesn't quite have a seat at the table, but pulled up her folding chair.

And I think that that was a great visual there. It very much varies across companies and it doesn't correlate to a company size or anything.

It's one of the things I look for in a company is do the leaders overall - the CEO, the senior leadership team - believe in the importance of communications and empower their communicators to have a seat at that table from the very beginning, from ideation, from brainstorming about a business solution, and to carrying it through so that it doesn't end up, as you were saying, those other examples. I think COVID, I am constantly harking back to some of the silver linings of COVID.

The importance of communications and communicators really came to light in COVID. I don't know any stats about this, but I would be willing to bet that if you did look, there were so many companies that I saw, at least in the Boston area, that were hiring communicators during that time, who were creating new communications jobs because they saw that it was really needed to have communicators at the table to help the company through that. First of all, I totally agree.

I think COVID, the communications impact was that communications was the only way to stay in touch with employees, right? To stay in touch with customers, to stay connected anybody outside of your four walls. And a lot of business leaders realized in that moment, they weren't actually very good at it. Because they had a way of working that was reliant on being in person people and when they weren't in person with people anymore, it was like, I don't know how to operate like this.

And so all of a sudden they did have to both improve themselves and surround themselves with good communicators. But I wanna pick back up on this theme because the bringing a folding chair to the table thing. Mm-Hmm. I thought was, I laughed when she said it. I believe her name is Mel from Mallinckrodt? I don't know her personally, but I saw her on stage. I thought she was great. I brought it up the subsequent conversation with Tanya Wymer from Biogen saying, what do you think about this?

They were sort of making the case of we're moving from having a folding chair on the path to getting that upholstered chair. And Tanya's response was she thought should only have a folding chair. Interesting. Because said that the folding chair allows us as communicators to then leave the boardroom and go among the employees and hear what they really think. And leave the building and go sit among patients, doctors, and advocates, and hear what they really think.

Cause we can bring folding chair with us everywhere we go, and then we have that external credibility when we come back into a boardroom that is oftentimes a little bit insular and doesn't hear from those audiences. I thought that was a pretty insightful take on it. I absolutely appreciate that and do agree. We need to be the eyes and ears for our fellow leaders. That said, I think we need to be seen as equally important leaders who deserve a full, regular seat at the table, too.

So I think it goes both ways. So let's not take the, uh, the folding versus upholstered chair too literally or too far, I guess, you're saying. Yeah, that makes sense. At conferences like this, I feel like it's really difficult, both for the presenters, the panelists, etcetera, trying to obviously impression on people, impart some wisdom. But it's difficult 'cause you don't know what level the audience is coming in at.

So, how do you set academic foundations like ways of thinking about things, but then also give really practical advice? So, elementary school grading, A, B, C, D, or F. How do you think our presenters did this week on walking that tightrope between setting foundations, big picture, academic versus like really practical advice? Yeah. I see it as the 101 class versus the master class. And I think different sessions did it better than others.

And I think that different people here were looking for different things. Some were really looking for the strategy and the high-level insights, whereas others are starting out and are looking for that tactical, how do I do this? I'll give one example related to one of the most frequent things we've already mentioned, AI.

There were certainly some panels that we had that were very, overall, high level, what AI can do and going forward in the future, there was nothing from that that you could then take and do when you got back to the office. Then, we had, one of the things that I really appreciated about the conference this go round, I've attended for many years, was that there were round tables that were small group discussions, and one of the round tables that I attended was on AI.

And in that session there were concrete examples shared, even walking through this is this type of ChatGPT. This is a free version. This is where you find it. And walked through taking a press release, asking it, explaining the prompt, walking through how you have it in two seconds, create an internal article for your audience on that subject. So really concrete, tactical examples, but it got to both sides.

Especially with AI, I think that's what's just absolutely critical is it's fine for us to have big picture conversations, but we don't need to have a vision for technology. We need to know how do we apply these things in the daily work. And people are still scared of AI and scared, is this going to make it so I lose my job? Am I going to be replaced by the computer? Is my company going to see this as a synergy thing? And oh, now your comms team that was ten can be two.

I think one of the things that plays into that is that, yes, it is progressing at the speed of light, but it is still so early. And the bias that is inherent in many of the gen AI tools because it's taking from the internet. Even in some of the different areas of medicine, we haven't done enough research.

There isn't even data out there for certain types of people and different things that if the data's not out there, it's certainly not on the internet, and so it's not even giving you the accurate thing. So you need to learn to mine through that, and you need a human to be able to recognize that that's one, not factual, or two, it's biased, or something else. So I don't see it as replacing us. But what I do see is it's absolutely going to change our jobs as communicators without a doubt.

And that we need to be both trying it out and experimenting. We need to be upskilling ourselves, upskilling our teams so that they can be the most valuable communicators because they know how to utilize AI. It can do some of their job for them, and then they can focus on other priorities that AI can't do. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I said this yesterday, my favorite quote in this area is Scott Galloway saying, "AI is not gonna take your job. Somebody using AI is gonna take your job."

Yes. Exactly. [Laughing] Exactly. Alright, so AI certainly a main theme of the conference. Health equity, certainly. Now you brought up DEI and we haven't come back to that yet. DEI, I would say, has many connotations and oftentimes in our roles we're talking about communicating in an inclusive way for the company. But if we're being honest with ourselves, that was not a very diverse conference in terms of our industry itself. So what do we do about that?

Well, I think it's also representative of our industry. So, I actually think that this was fairly diverse compared to some other conferences that I've attended. I know how difficult, it is to build diverse teams. We need to get more people of color, and often more men, all different types, into communications in general so that we can then have more diverse conferences.

One of the things that I absolutely loved was a leader who I worked for a number of years, he had a guiding principle that anybody asked him to be on a panel or at a conference that there had to be a woman on the panel. Wow. And could, she couldn't be the moderator. She had to be subject matter expert.

That changed a number of panels because they would actually make sure that they then went out and found a woman if he was saying, no, I'm not gonna do it unless there is a female subject matter expert on there. And so I think there are different things that we all have to do to try and change that. My husband teases me because it seems like no matter what team I have, I only have one man on my team half the time.

[Paul chuckles] And I'll have a team of ten or fifteen people, and it always seems to be that there's always only one man. And he's like, you need to really branch out. It's like, I am looking. Mm-Hmm. Yep. Yep. When I first joined Lippe Taylor with Maureen Lippe, I think I was like the third man in the company or something like that. Yeah. Yep. You're not usually a minority. Right, right. Well, I've been in this industry long enough that I've grown accustomed to it, I guess.

But I think diversity, equity, and inclusion was one of the threads that went throughout so many of the different discussions over the last two days. I think it's something that more than anything we need to be focused on and we need to be cognizant of in everything that we do, whether it's in the storytelling and making sure that we're telling all different types of stories. That we're finding that diversity of thought, those opinions.

One of the most important things that we heard over and over and over again is the importance of asking good questions. And I think that's also part of that. But having to listen and make sure that we're listening more than we're talking. It also goes to who are we listening to and are we going to the same people all the time, or are we making sure that we're getting that diversity of opinions and thoughts? Yep. Absolutely.

It's funny because one of the real challenges is that communications moves at the speed of light. Yes. Marketing moves in long windows, big planning cycles, big investments. Communications moves at the speed of light. And it is a lot harder to do that with an inclusive team. It's a lot easier to get a bunch of people in the room that all went to the same school. That all have very similar backgrounds. That all see things in the same way.

You get around the table, you're like, hey, do we all agree what we should do? Yep. Sure. That was easy, let's go. But, of course, you never get the best results that way. Never. You just get something done quickly. And that only reflects you, and then you're never gonna grow. You're never gonna learn. Yep. And so I do think it's one of the things that is a, it's an inherent challenge in communications is knowing when we can slow down. Mm-Hmm.

And take the time to get a more fulsome, thoughtful team with diverse experiences versus when is it actually something that has to be responded to right now?

That leads very nicely into one of the things, one of today's panels, which was on crisis communications. And I think that is the time that you need to be really fast. You need to act quickly. You need to think quickly. But you still need to make sure that you're getting the right stakeholders, that you're hearing from the right people to make sure that what you are going to quickly put out there or pull together is accurate, is reflective of the situation. And so on.

That was, I thought, a really good panel today. Again, it was very much validating some of the things we know. We need to have a plan. We need to have a framework, overall framework. We need to have really good aligned messaging. We need to have different scenarios so that we can react quickly, and we need to be monitoring and adjusting as things are happening. They're all things that as communicators we go back, we say, oh, that's 101.

But then when we're thrown into a situation, it all goes out the window. I can't tell you how many very, very capable, experienced communicators would agree with everything you just said, and then go launch a marketing campaign or launch some other kind of program and not actually have done the pre-work in case there's a crisis. Because at the end of the day it's like, oh, the crisis doesn't happen that often and they're busy and they got a lot of stuff to do.

And the one out of I don't know what the number is, but times where it crops on you, you really wish you'd been a little bit more planful. Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like as communicators, so many of us, we're gluttons for punishment, that it's crisis comms that draws us in and that excites us. So because we know we can thrive and we can help solve that situation.

Yeah. There's like a little volunteer firefighter in all of us, right? Yes. [Laughs] That leads to another theme that I heard throughout the few days, which is about embracing our failures. And failing fast. Talk about something that should be done fast, failing fast, and then being able to learn, really look at what happened, what went well with something, what didn't go well, how we can adjust, and then how we can succeed the next go round. Or how we fail fast again and try again.

I think so many companies are more open to that now than they ever were before. And then the importance of talking about our failures and sharing those failures. Not just sharing best practices, but sharing our failures as well

so others can learn from them. That certainly relates to the measurement conversation as well. It was actually Seth Duncan, who's our Chief Science Officer, said something there. I was sitting in the audience is going like, oh, that's really smart.

[They laugh] But he basically said, the reason that most measurement frameworks favor marketing work, which they do, is because there's so much more investment made on the marketing side and therefore they invest more in the measurement campaigns or the measurement work. But if you look at what ChatGPT and some of these AI tools have done for measurement is it's made it so that PR can now deploy the same level of sophistication and measurement the marketing teams have forever.

Okay, so then what's the behavior change that comes with that? The behavior change that comes with that is committing to what are we trying to accomplish with this program? Instead of running a whole program and then at the very end putting together a PowerPoint deck with all the things and being like, well, it got some clicks over here, and some views over there. And we're pretty sure we impacted more people searching in Google and look at all these different things that happened.

That doesn't carry the same weight as saying up front, we're trying to accomplish this. At the end, measuring it, and if it didn't accomplish that, owning it, saying, here's what we learned and then maybe it accomplished something else. Great. But don't try to rewrite history at the end. You reminded me of another theme that went through the conference, which was measurement, data, and analytics, and making sure that everything that we do has a measurement component into it.

We talked a lot at this conference about leading through change, about communicators as change agents. How do we actually measure that change? I loved hearing about measuring the behaviors as well as thinking about - we all know about different qualitative and quantitative measurements, but also other types of measurements and not discounting anecdotal measurement, and looking at things like how engaged are your employees? Are they turning on their camera on Zoom?

Some of those, how many people are coming into the office? How many people are showing up for events or for town halls? And really thinking about that and then asking them the questions, doing the follow up, doing the focus groups to ask, why did you come or why didn't you come?

One of the things I always do in our town hall surveys is ask that we send it out and ask everybody to fill it out whether they attended or not, because the first question after "Did you attend" is okay, if you said no, it's why not? And trying to capture if people were too busy, if they didn't hear about it, if they didn't think it was gonna pertain to them. So it's trying to get to the why, rather than just the yes/no. It's interesting.

One of the breakout sessions was around innovation and one of the topics of conversation was coming up, what are the next big high value actions that we're gonna try to drive through our work? And the reason was because a lot of campaigns are targeted at sending people to a website. So it's like, go to this website, sign up to find more, go to this website, Doctor Locator, go to this website, Screener. Go to this website, take the pledge.

Whatever it is, it's sending people to a website, which frankly is not a very innate behavior anymore, right? You think about your consumer life, Pepsi doesn't end their commercial with go to pepsi.com. We don't do that. You look at what AI's doing now with auto summarizations, 60% of searches are zero click searches. You search and you don't click on anything. That auto summarization at the top is just beginning. It's gonna take over. We're not gonna go to websites anymore.

We just gotta teach the AI tools what to think. So I don't have an answer here other than to say, I think it's incumbent on us to think about what are the high value actions that we are gonna try to drive, and how are we gonna measure 'em? Yes, definitely. And that's one of my favorite things about coming to a conference like this is we're not expecting everyone to have the answers.

It's what are the conversations and what are the things we should be thinking about and then going back and experimenting with? Yep, absolutely. So speaking of going back and experimenting, anything that you're gonna take back to Boston and Takeda and experiment with from this conference? One of the things, one of the round tables that I participated in was about reverse mentorship. Ahhh. And we do a lot of mentorship at Takeda.

Although, we don't have a reverse, a formal reverse mentorship program, and I found that idea really interesting, especially when you're talking about diversity and trying to get different ideas and diversity of thought. We can all learn from everyone. No matter if they're older than us, younger than us, look different than us. Everything. And that was another thing that I will take back, which is just, again, reinforcing being a continuous learner. And so the mentoring, the utilizing AI.

It's something we've been driving in our company for a very long time. We really aspire to be the most trusted digital biopharmaceutical company, and so we've been encouraging all of our employees to daily utilize AI and figure out how to incorporate it into their work for the benefit of our patients. This conference gave me more ideas for how to do that. Some of the concrete ways that I can incorporate it into my

role as a communications leader. The other thing that I have been trying to drive with my team for the last couple of years, but I was thrilled to hear talked about here was about wellness. How we in our industry have been programmed for decades upon decades that communicators need to be on 24/7, and we need to work every minute that we're awake. We need to constantly be connected. That is just not the case. Yes, we need be accessible if a crisis happens and when a crisis happens.

Two years ago, we had a crisis that I literally worked 24/7 for about seven weeks. There was not a day - my husband knew I was just gonna be working that whole time while we dealt with an issue in Japan, and that absolutely is going to happen and we need to do that. Seven weeks is a long crisis. It, it was. And luckily we had some people help us, so we had a couple of days off, but that is not the norm and it shouldn't be.

Throughout my career, it would be my husband and I watching TV, and I have my laptop on my lap and I am just working. It finally came to a head. He's like, you can't do this anymore. And what I learned also, what really snapped me out of it was leading a larger team, and realizing the impact I was having on them. If I wouldn't disconnect, they wouldn't disconnect. Can't be what they can't see. Exactly. And they were very much if I said, put you're out of office on. Be sick.

Like, just because you can work from home doesn't mean you should work from your sick bed. Or you go to the beach and you leave your work computer at home. And they're like, you don't do that, pot calling the kettle black. So I now do it and I no longer put my cell phone as my out of office, I refer to someone else covering for me. And if I am sick, I turn my out of office on and direct them to someone else. And by doing that, my team has now started to do that.

And by the way, you're giving that someone else a growth opportunity. Yes. Yes. Right? As opposed to keeping it yourself. In some cases you think you're doing them a favor by saying, oh, I'll take that. But actually it was a growth opportunity for them. Exactly. So it was wonderful to hear people talking about that and our need for self-care as leaders so we can be better leaders for our team, but how we can also role model for our team and teach them that communicators do not have to work 24/7.

We can do it when we need to do it, but not all the time. Before we wrap up, I just have to say that this is my favorite conference. Year, after year, after year, I love coming. It's like a big reunion of all the people I've worked with over the last decades. Michelle Benz, the conference Production Director, and Chairperson, Wendy Lund, do an amazing job year, after year, after year. They really do.

I was really proud to be part of the advisory board, helping to pull the conference together, the subjects and the speakers. But they do everything and it just keeps getting better and better. So I highly recommend, to any communicators, if you haven't attended, please come next year. And I bet you will come year after year. I absolutely second that as a person who's in my third year here, and will be back again next year.

Amy, thank you so much for sharing all your thoughts, insights, and takeaways. I'm sure our listeners will appreciate it, and next year maybe we will see them here. Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Frictionless Marketing. For a complete transcript of this conversation or more information on /prompt, please visit us at meetprompt.co. If you found this episode insightful, share it with your connections on LinkedIn.

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