Optimizing Content Production: Tracking & Improving Efficiency 

One of the biggest challenges the pharma marketing industry is currently facing is the lack of resources to produce high-quality content at speed. In other words, it’s difficult to keep up with the growing demand for content while consistently maintaining quality standards. 

In the third episode of the Pharma Talks podcast, Nataliya Andreychuk, CEO of Viseven, and Joe Falcone share their insights on how to build an efficient Center of Excellence designed to accelerate content production and reduce time to market. 

Efficiency & Success: What Makes a Center of Excellence Excellent 

Joe Falcone started his career in the digital agency world around 2008–2009, right when digital was just starting to take off. Over the past 14 years or so, he’s held a variety of roles across enterprise, IT, and modular content strategy, gaining experience across multiple functions. 

Our speakers recalled the days when digital content marketing was just becoming a thing. Nataliya and Joe’s paths crossed thanks to modular content, and that’s where the collaboration started. Setting up operations in this space brings a lot to the table — best practices, lessons learned, and plenty of opportunities to share experiences and recommendations. 

The discussion started with a big question: How can a center of excellence be successful and efficient? As Joe noted, there are two components to a center of excellence: 

1) Production and change management, and 
2) Excellence and oversight. 

The first part is about creative content production and “getting it done” — the development process, strategic planning, execution, workflow optimization, and change management. But just as important is the second part: driving excellence through governance, best practices, and learning from different markets. 

From the “factory point,” one key detail many often overlook is the impact of things like channel standards, CX touchpoints, and HCP interactions. These details may seem minor when scattered across different functions and sources, but they play a huge role in MLR efficiency and overall experience. 

Another crucial (yet underestimated) piece is how you work with internal or external agencies. Imagine handing off files to a content production agency 24 hours before launch, but the naming conventions don’t match their expectations — this creates confusion, last-minute delays, and unnecessary churn at the most critical time. These “little things” create real friction. 

This is where a center of excellence plays a big role. From the excellence perspective, having a team that oversees the standardization of processes contributes to a better understanding of how to cater to the needs of local and regional markets without doing it “my way or the highway.” As Joe pointed out, assembling a team that’s responsible for supervising standards is far from inflexibility — it’s quite the opposite. 

Here is a thing: you cannot outsource excellence. Setting up that team internally is crucial for the company’s success, as they understand the company’s culture.  A true CoE understands your organization’s culture and knows how to effectively engage internal teams. They remove roadblocks across the content lifecycle and bring lessons learned from across markets. 

There is another issue companies are dealing with establishing a center of excellence could solve: focus on efficiency, and not effectiveness and experience. If your main goal is efficiency, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Both Nataliya and Joe agreed that if you concentrate on bringing a great experience to internal stakeholders and customers, cost savings and efficiency will come one way or another. But if every day your goal looks like, “Well, how can we save a few dollars to make this email?”, you’re missing the bigger picture.  

Tracking & Monitoring Your Results 

Not everything is as easy to measure as we’d like it to be. It’s a matter of agreeing on what you want to measure and having the right mechanisms in place to collect that data. However, there are a lot of creative ways to come up with how to measure the success of your content production and marketing efforts. 

When Joe was working in the IT industry, part of his role involved managing the digital roadmap for various business units and developing business cases for multimillion-dollar investments. As he explained, his team was always responsible for justifying the ROI and determining how to measure it effectively. 

Sometimes, it was as simple as key stakeholder interviews. Think about the customer side — HCPs, for example — doing ad boards or participating in larger industry surveys to help gain insights from customers and see if their experience truly has improved. There are many methods for obtaining all that data, and sometimes, they can require you to experiment and innovate. From conducting interviews to determining KPIs for content, there is a lot to work with. 

There are many effective ways to gather that data — and in some cases, even conducting interviews is the best way to uncover meaningful insights. Nataliya agreed, saying that while this may feel like the old style, even with all our experience, we’ll still be new to certain aspects. Despite that, we need to set expectations for our team, such as delivering a number of digital assets within a defined short time to market or meeting certain goals quickly. 

Nataliya emphasized the importance of owning your data and having the ability to measure it. That’s why having the right technical setup is crucial — to track the data accurately and ensure full ownership. At the same time, it’s essential to continuously monitor progress. 

The Impact of Centers of Excellence and Its Role in Pharma Organizations 

A center of excellence plays a few key roles. Here is what Nataliya and Joe shared. 

One of the most common challenges in pharma is that people often change roles in the marketing space — moving from brand to brand, climbing the career ladder, or simply leaving the organization. As a result, knowledge transfer gets lost. The center of excellence can act as a bridge to support onboarding, shorten learning curves, and help new team members quickly understand what their responsibilities and goals are based on their roles and objectives. 

Another important role of the center of excellence is to serve as a strategic partner to the teams executing the work—such as the omnichannel teams and brand teams who are creating the brand plans and overseeing projects. The CoE can be part of the early planning process, helping teams think through key questions: 

• What do we want to achieve based on what we know about this brand? 

• What does the competitive landscape look like? 

• What tools and capabilities can we leverage for better personalization, targeting, and channel selection? 

Often, teams are very focused on budget — trying to get the most out of it — but they may not fully understand how to partner with capability teams. This is where the CoE steps in to close that gap and provide visibility into tools, roadblocks (like in the MLR process), and even how to brief the digital content factory or onboard someone effectively. 

Lastly, the CoE can have a strong impact on digital content production across large organizations. Some things work better for specific markets or teams, and the CoE can partner with them — especially where there are ambassadors in local markets who can provide feedback. This helps evolve the global standards based on real, on-the-ground insight. Centers of excellence gather these insights from local teams and bring them back to the enterprise level, helping to balance flexibility with the need for consistent, high-quality execution. This ensures that excellence is not just a goal but a continuous and scalable process. 

Nataliya agreed that continuous improvement and learning are essential elements of any center of excellence. A true partnership between the vendor and the internal organization relies on transparent communication and building strong bridges of collaboration.  

The Best Practice for Setting Up Centers of Excellence 

This “secret” component is often overlooked, but the truth is that it’s incredibly important to build cross-functional partnerships. The key is getting the teams on board and helping them understand their role and how upcoming changes will benefit everyone. Finding other people’s “why” is essential, and you’ll often discover that people genuinely want evolution and progress. So that’s just it: the best practice is cross-functional thinking. 

AI-Powered Excellence: How AI Is Reshaping Centers of Excellence 

As Joe pointed out, AI can be thought of as augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. AI is a partner that helps us work smarter. There’s so much potential — the key is identifying the most impactful use cases where AI can truly make a difference. Technology is advancing so rapidly that today’s answers could be outdated tomorrow. 

You can even develop an AI agent — without needing a massive amount of resources — to be at the heart of your center of excellence. This agent can provide support, answer questions, and guide people through information, processes, and documentation. It becomes a first line of help for those turning to centers of excellence looking for support. 

The second key point is that even team members at lower levels should understand how to use AI. How do you prompt it? How do you leverage it? That’s why Centers of Excellence should also include a training component — to help people feel more confident and empowered to work with AI. 

Nataliya, agreeing with Joe, added that thinking of AI as a partner allows both humans and technology to evolve together. By setting up CoEs now, we gain access to the data that will help us train and refine tomorrow’s AI tools. This is the right time to start experimenting and aligning with broader goals like standardization, omnichannel content, and modular content production strategy. It’s time to aim high. 

The Bottom Line 

The biggest piece of advice? Don’t try to be perfect. Progress over perfection. Don’t be afraid to just start and make mistakes—sitting still and waiting is far worse than failing. If you learn something, then it isn’t really a failure. 

Ask for help. Be inclusive. Tap into the wealth of information from experts, peers, ChatGPT, and other tools. And don’t be afraid to ask AI how it can help you. Challenge your challenges. Figure out the answers. Define how you’ll measure success—and how those answers can move you forward. 

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