Webinars. Time to see them as something more

First published in Pharma Industry 3/2021, September 2021. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument is that the standard pharma webinar, an introduction by the company followed by one speaker and a slide deck for 45 to 50 minutes, stopped working once every company started running them, and that the way out is to build the broadcast as a production with a rhythm of its own. That is the case the article makes, and the practical advice around it, many speakers on short slots, one message per slide, planned energy lifts across the running order, is offered as production craft drawn from two productions the author ran himself. The note below goes through every part of the article, because passing over a section in silence would read as a verdict that it needs no comment.

Two things about the evidence are worth having in front of you. The case is built on two of the author's own productions, a global webinar series in 2020 and a company kick-off in 2021, described from the inside, and on one conference lecture. The figures reported from them, more than 22,000 participants in 117 countries across 15 live broadcasts, are his own account and are not independently sourced here. The opening claim that doctors receive between 10 and 40 webinar invitations is introduced as something "there are figures saying", with no primary source named, and the article gives it without a time period in the opening and as per week further down. The section on the neuroscience behind engagement is relayed from a lecture heard at a congress in 2018, and the claim about Avatar having the shortest time of static image up to that point carries no published source, so it should not be repeated as an established finding. The cross-reference in that section to "PI 4-18" points to the congress report published here as #INBOUND2018, Boston.

One mechanic in particular needs handling before it is copied. The way the two pieces of value were delivered in the global series was that participants who wanted them had to contact the company's local sales representative, and the recorded series is described at the end as premium material you get access to when you leave your contact details. Both of those are collection of personal data from healthcare professionals and a handover of that data to a sales organization, and in a pharma setting that is a question for your own compliance, regulatory and data protection functions before the first invitation goes out, not after. The rest of the article is a document from the middle of the pandemic and reads as one: the request from Lif that companies stop taking time from care staff, the year and a half of homes as offices, and the collapse of the personal sales meeting are all conditions of 2020 and 2021, not the situation now.

There are figures today saying that doctors, depending somewhat on speciality, receive between 10 and 40 invitations to various webinars. Having looked into this business of webinars for a while, the picture is relatively clear. The majority of these webinars are what I call standard webinars, that is an introduction by the pharmaceutical company and after that a presentation by a speaker whose slides carry a lot of information or text. With the competition that has arisen within the webinar channel, it is time to see them as something more. It is time to take the next step in order to get ahead.

It is very nearly time to go live. I am sitting at my laptop and we are in the large conference room at At Six in central Stockholm. In the room there are close to 50 participants, all of whom have taken their seats around the eight round tables set out in two rows. The flowers are on the tables and on the stage, the lights are on, and behind the scenes the two moderators are ready to run out.

Along one long side sit the eight of us who make up the project and production team, each with our own task. The enormous wall screen, 12 meters wide and 3 meters high and running at 8K, glows an energetic pink.

It is time for a pharmaceutical company's kick-off, and as I look out over the whole arrangement I am proud that everything is in place, and that for the second time I have been given the company's trust to put together the team that will deliver a broadcast out of the ordinary.

Today we have lived through a year and a half of covid pandemic. Virtual meetings and webinars have become everyday fare, something we all both appreciate and are beginning to get thoroughly tired of, now that our homes are our offices.

There is something very easy about a virtual meeting, we do not have to invest so much in the interaction, and at the same time it lacks the physical closeness and the natural dialogue that mean so much in the interplay and the engagement between people.

The same holds within healthcare, where care staff have fought like heroes against a care burden that has at times been overwhelming. Early on, Lif went out and asked the pharmaceutical companies not to email, visit or in any other way take time from care staff, all so that the industry for its part would give room for treating patients.

The personal meeting for a salesperson employed at a pharmaceutical company disappeared practically overnight.

When the worst of the shock had settled, the companies began to look over the possibilities at hand for reaching healthcare, and one after another they all turned to webinars as the form of contact.

Today we hear about doctors, depending somewhat on speciality, who receive somewhere between 10 and 40 invitations to webinars per week.

This means that the ordinary webinar, that is the one involving a short introduction by the pharmaceutical company's representative followed by a speaker showing their slides for 45 to 50 minutes, is starting to look far too unappealing.

It is now time to take the next step, to start seeing a webinar as something more, and in this article you will read about two different broadcasts that each, in two different ways, have shown how important it is that we develop our webinars into something more if we are to reach the success we want through that channel.

But we pause the pharmaceutical company's kick-off for a moment in order to start at the beginning.

22,000+ viewers in 117 countries

It was a Friday afternoon at the end of March 2020 when a colleague received an email from a pharmaceutical company's global marketing organization. Earlier the same day their global chief executive had decided that some form of communication should be created online to remedy the interaction between them and the market having come to a halt. All their salespeople around the whole world were sitting still in their homes and not meeting their customers, so this communication was to be created immediately.

The email we received that afternoon contained the question that became the starting shot for intensive planning work, which in the end resulted in more than 22,000 people in 117 countries taking part seven weeks later.

I had the privilege of becoming part of the small team that was quickly put together to work out a plan for what in the end became a series of webinars to be broadcast globally.

The setup we created was a series of five webinars, an hour long, where each webinar had 4 to 6 speakers and was broadcast three times during one day in order to cover the time zones in different parts of the world.

The plan was sent in and landed on the chief executive's desk, where it was approved at once.

We could get going in earnest, and a little over a week later we went live with the first webinar, while having a clear overview of the series as a whole.

Before, during and after

In our planning work the customer was at the center throughout, and we spent a lot of time and focus on identifying the needs they had in the pandemic that had sunk its claws into the world.

One factor that helped a great deal was that there had been a collaboration with the pharmaceutical company for many years, so the combined customer knowledge in the team was large.

The insights we landed on regarding the market's needs were mixed with the mantra "before, during and after", which became a central part of our discussions, and the goal was that each webinar should contain one small and one large value, both of which would be available after the webinar.

The small and somewhat simpler value became a one-pager containing each speaker's best tips, summary or similar from their presentation. The larger value became a form of material that would help the participant in their clinical everyday work, and consisted of different types of "tools" for the patient meeting.

Both of these materials were promoted again and again during the webinar, carefully placed within the broadcast so that we did not become repetitive, through the message that if the participant wanted access to either of the materials they should contact the company's local sales representative.

Many speakers, shorter time

A very important ingredient in the recipe for success was that we engaged what can be considered an unusually large number of speakers for a one hour webinar.

The thinking behind it was as simple as it was obvious.

In order to succeed in reaching out, and above all in getting through, to such different types of markets and therefore such different types of individuals as we had as our target group, we had to maximize the engagement and the sense of value.

Each speaker was given either 3 to 4 minutes, 6 to 8 minutes or 12 to 15 minutes to convey their message, and when an experienced speaker who normally has 30, 45 or 60 minutes at their disposal is asked to compress their "usual" message into a much smaller timeframe, something very interesting happened.

Everything became very much more focused, direct, clear and informative.

In each webinar there were two longer keynotes, and then the broadcast was balanced with medium length and short presentations depending on need and on what I call a little further down "the broadcast's wave pattern".

For the participant there was therefore a pulse throughout, a pace, where something new and interesting was happening almost all the time. A break came and something new started practically all the time, and between these came elements known as "bumpers", that is graphic elements with energetic music.

And the result?

The goal was to create communication that had a value for the recipient, that was experienced as engaging and that got the interaction with the market going.

All in all more than a staggering 22,000 participants in 117 countries took part in the total of 15 webinars broadcast live, in large part thanks to the global sales force, who had been given very clear directives from top management to sell the webinar series in to all their customers immediately and with great focus.

There were many who took part, and with that there were many who picked up the prompts placed in the broadcast to contact their local sales representative in order to get hold of one of the two materials, and after each webinar that was exactly what happened.

The salespeople began to be contacted by their customers at a level they had never experienced before.

What we as a planning group, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company and with each of our excellent speakers, had hoped for was to turn around the deadlock the pandemic had created, and looking back we have been able to conclude that we succeeded.

In the feedback collected afterwards there were many statements saying that the webinars had been too short, that people wanted to see more and that they were incredibly good and informative. One quotation that stuck was that "our customers say they get the answers to questions they have not even had time to ask".

My reading is that something like that cannot be achieved unless you work with a strong focus on the customer and on what is valuable to them.

I was myself given the trust to stand in front of the camera for four of the five webinars, and when I was not doing that I sat behind and was part of the support team answering questions.

The combined experience from the project gave the insight of how incredibly important it is always to create the room to plan enough with the customer in focus, and always to keep the mantra "before, during and after" in mind.

As an extension of that mantra you should also explore the possibility of maximizing the lifespan of what has been created, and today the webinar series is used as premium material you get access to when you leave your contact details.

So what began as an email one Friday afternoon in March gave a great value for the company then, and now, looking back, it carries on creating customer contacts and building business.

The neuroscience behind engagement

The setup we chose, with several speakers and high activity in each webinar, has a scientific basis.

In 2018 I was at one of the world's largest digital congresses, INBOUND18, in Boston, and wrote an article about it in PI 4-18. There I saw the neuroscientist Dr. Carmen Simon describe the neuroscience behind attention and engagement.

She argued that what best captures our attention is when we know roughly, but not exactly, what is coming in the next few seconds, and above all when it comes to visual stimuli. She argued that movement, activity, color and so on are incredibly important in presentations, and above all in virtual ones where there is no presenter in the room providing part of the stimulation.

There I learned that one of the world's most successful films, Avatar, was also the film that had the shortest time of "static image" up to that point.

By "static image" is meant when nothing is moving on the screen, and in that context she compared Avatar with the old westerns where views over a still desert could run for several seconds.

Taken together it can be said that attention and engagement get a boost when our senses are stimulated in a way where we know roughly what is coming, but not exactly. Decisions can then be taken on the basis of the information according to the following pattern:

Engaging content leads to attention and engagement, which leads to a memory being created, which leads to a decision being taken.

So how do you apply that to a webinar?

It is incredibly important to separate the physical meeting from the virtual one. In the physical meeting there are naturally more stimuli, which gives one set of conditions, while the virtual meeting lacks many of these stimuli, which then have to be replaced by others.

One of the techniques that comes naturally in virtual meetings is to avoid static, non-animated slides in the presentation that stay up too long.

In the global webinar series we turned that into several speakers per webinar, presentation slides that carried strong and lively colors, and movement in the form of both larger and smaller animations. We also aimed for each slide to convey a single message, and where possible reinforced by a powerful photograph or illustration, which resulted in more slides, most of which were shown for less than 20 seconds.

All in order to increase the sense of activity and participation, something that in turn boosts attention and engagement.

In a setup like that you also build in the possibility of "lifting the energy level" at the points where the presentation contained "heavier passages", which means you can see a webinar as a kind of wave pattern where the viewer experiences heavier and lighter passages to take in.

See the webinar's content as a wave

So it is now time to come back to At Six and the pharmaceutical company's kick-off, and with that to travel forward in time by about 18 months.

It is time to go live.

Expectations are high, my smart watch informs me that so is my pulse, and I have to say that I love it.

The intro music "Move on up" starts playing and the countdown from 58 seconds begins. The moderators run onto the stage with only a few seconds left. In their hands they have their cue cards.

It is a large production we have put together, with a center in Stockholm that also had hubs with a film team each in Norway, Finland and Denmark, where the local teams had met. But since the whole organization could not meet because of the pandemic, the main goals set were to create interaction between the teams and to build energy in the organization.

So it is time to think about engagement again, and this time in the form of identifying and following the broadcast's natural wave pattern. And what does that mean?

Well, a broadcast's wave pattern means that there are always passages that are heavier on facts, or just somewhat longer without a break, and therefore tougher when it comes to holding the participant's attention and engagement.

These parts of the broadcast are seen as downward slopes and valleys on the wave.

To handle this downward trend, elements are cut in that lift the energy. It can be in the form of a "bumper", that is a graphic element with energetic music, or a short pre-recorded and mildly amusing element.

The goal of this is to lift the energy level in the broadcast and with it among the participants, which then becomes the upward slope and the crest of the wave.

Other examples are when a longer welcome speech is alternated with short, entertaining conversations with colleagues in the other countries, or when a colleague showing figures and graphs is followed by an inspirational speaker.

That is how the whole running order for the broadcast is built up, minute by minute, block by block. With the focus throughout on identifying and following the broadcast's natural wave pattern.

Conclusions and take home messages

The expression "alone is strong" rarely holds in the era we live in, and in the two examples I have drawn insights from above it holds no better. The article is written from my perspective, but in every project there have been skilled, experienced colleagues and partners who have all contributed an enormous amount.

It is always interesting to start thinking about how this can be applied in the pharmaceutical industry, about how I can come up with various thought-provoking suggestions. But there are such incredibly experienced and skilled people at the companies around the country, and I hope that you who have read this article are one of them. That you see how you at your company can use the tricks and the lines of thought mentioned here to improve your broadcasts to some degree and where the need is there.

It is time that we as an industry take the next step and see webinars as something more than just a webinar. That we see it for what it really is, entertainment.

Entertainment that flows both up and down, with certain necessary elements of scientific data.

Time to start surfing the wave.

Until next time,

Fredrik Holmboe

Digital jack of all trades

fredrik@dualia.se

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. The congress report referred to in the neuroscience section is #INBOUND2018, Boston. Building a channel that people come back to is what the Content Engine Sprint is for.