Agility and Flexibility Award

Summary of work

Janssen’s plan to host a 1.5-day face-to-face meeting in March 2020 was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with its agency partner Ashfield, Janssen decided to reorganise the meeting into a fully virtual format, bringing together 60 of the world’s leading haematologists to establish, discuss and prioritise strategies for achieving Janssen’s vision to eliminate cancer.

The bespoke, agile and asynchronous programme developed by Ashfield was designed to minimise the emerging Zoom fatigue, while ensuring an engaging format in a competitively time-poor virtual HCP environment. The meeting series included:

• A virtual online platform – for pre-, peri- and post-meeting engagement (March-July 2021)
• Eleven disease-specific virtual advisory boards held in April 2021
• Video presentations from Janssen senior leaders and advisors.

Continual engagement with advisors from four disease areas via the online platform provided Janssen with increased opportunities for interaction and gathering of in-depth and valuable actionable strategic insights than would have been possible with a traditional face-to-face meeting, as originally planned. By July 2021, Janssen had hosted 28 hours of virtual meetings, and had received over 600 comments from advisors across over 40 insightful discussion topics via the online platform.

Judges' comments

This work by Ashfield MedComms and Janssen demonstrated impressive speed of implementation and publication. It had a good use of gamification using new technology working across four disease types. They tracked engagement and adjusted the agenda based on feedback. From Reality to Virtual showed large scale ambition.