As 2024 draws to a close, it’s a great opportunity to reflect on our great work and achievements over the year.
Firstly, we would like to thank our members for their continued support and contribution to our initiatives this year. We are proud to be able to bring the industry together and create a unique space for our members to collaborate, highlight excellence and drive change.
In a challenging year, the PM Society has continued to drive forward and engage in best practice initiatives, including our interest groups and awards programmes, which continue to grow year on year.
We are also extremely proud of our CSR contributions and achievements. The PM Society is a not-for-profit organisation, and we have the ability and power to drive some powerful and life-changing projects.
Without our passionate and committed members, coming together to celebrate the excellent work that has taken place at our awards and driving the industry to grow through our various interest groups and initiatives, we wouldn’t be able to provide the support and improvements as we have this year.
Our Team
Our board members Rachel Farrow, Carwyn Jones, Colin Williams and Jenny Claridge were joined by Dominic Marchant at the beginning of the year, as new Chair. Dom has brought his creative passion and can-do attitude to build momentum on some great initiatives, many of which will come to fruition in 2025.
We are also grateful to our Operations Team who tirelessly drive our initiatives forward and our Executive Committee and Industry Committee steering groups.
What have we done?
2024 Awards Programme
The PM Society Awards and the PM Society Digital Awards are the highlight of our efforts to recognise best practice in pharmaceutical marketing and healthcare communications. Now in their 38th and 15th years respectively, they are key programmes for the industry and very much dates fixed in the annual calendars!
This year we saw both awards programmes grow once again in terms of engagement, sponsorship and attendance.
We awarded 109 gold, silver, and bronze awards across 39 categories at both the PM Society Awards and the PM Society Digital Awards.
Over 1,300 of you attended the ceremonies and we worked with 143 judges with 1,144 hours of judging. An amazing contribution of dedication and expertise all in volunteer time!
We also held two steering group meetings in Maidenhead and London to help shape the future positioning of our awards. Representatives from awards entrants, sponsors, and judges joined some of the PM Society board members to discuss the future of awards programmes and the realignment of our awards to meet the demands of the industry. Huge thanks to those that attended. All of this work has helped us course correct our competitions and ensure we are aligned with the ever-changing industry.
Interest Groups
We have 8 interest groups with a total of 141 members, covering Diversity & Inclusion, Industry-agency relationships, Patient Engagement, Sustainability, Digital, Learning and Development, Marketing Leadership, and Careers.
Each year we see high quality content, important debate, and education initiated by our interest group members.
We saw the Industry-agency relationships interest group achieve the first pharma signature on the Pitch Positive Pledge. The group has been working on a Guide to Agency Procurement, soon to be published, and hosted a series of round table sessions with agency and industry leaders to discuss the agency model and the need for change.
The Digital interest group produced seven articles covering topics including: who is the customer & connecting compassionately; and AI in Pharma Marketing & Medical.
We introduced the new Marketing Leadership initiative. This was created to promote Marketing Leadership as we believe it is the fundamental premise of the Pharmaceutical Marketing Society.
We hosted 5 LinkedIn Live events with 2,663 combined video views. The PM Talk series is now hosted on 7 different podcast platforms including Spotify and Amazon music.
The Patient Engagement Interest Group released 4 new articles and have started their plans for a Patient Category award winners interview series to begin in 2025.
The Learning & Development Interest Group ran 3 LinkedIn Live events and began a pilot mentorship programme. The entry process has now closed, and mentors are being assigned to their mentees.
The Diversity & inclusion Interest Group continued its series of presentations from award winners and ran a second benchmarking survey to find out about perceptions of diversity within both pharma and agency organisations. Results are headlined on our website with more to come in the new year.
The Sustainability Interest Group has been working on making the PM Society Awards and the PM Society Digital Awards more sustainable. For the PM Society Digital Awards, we use The Brewery as our venue as they are moving towards running more sustainable events. They use energy from renewable sources along with energy saving actions such as the use of LED light bulbs and adjusting the air conditioning and heating, reduce water usage using water meters and installing more efficient and modern bathrooms, recycle as much as possible and limit single-use plastic, as well as using food suppliers as close to the venue as possible to cut food miles.
We have also signed up to Carbon Capture, The Woodland Trust’s Woodland Carbon Scheme. They calculate the carbon footprint of our programmes for our awards and we send a corresponding amount of money to The Woodland Trust to plant trees. Throughout both awards, we consider the amount of printing for our programmes and try to keep this to a minimum.
It’s been a successful year for these groups with lots of engaging content and discussions and we’re excited to see the challenges and topics they will address in 2025.
Careers Initiatives
The PM Society Careers Event was back for its fifth year in February 2024 at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. This event is part of our endeavours to see more talented people from a range of backgrounds join our industry. A common saying heard in our industry is “I wasn’t aware of healthcare communications; it seems I just fell into my role”. Our Careers event was created to spread awareness of the industry itself as well as the roles available so attendees can make a well-informed decision about their career path.
This year’s event saw more exhibitors and more attendees than previously. We had over 230 registered attendees, 10 exhibitors, and 24 speakers for the presentations, panel discussions and interactive sessions.
We have maintained our Healthcomms.careers partnership with the HCA in raising awareness of healthcare communications as a career path to those outside of the sector. This work has delivered a series of impactful LinkedIn campaigns this year, as well as attendance at careers fairs across the country. As we go into 2025, this partnership is holding a dedicated careers fair in London with over 250 attendees interested in our sector expected to participate. The HealthComms.Careers website has also directed over 2000 individuals interested in healthcare communications as a career to our members’ career websites.
With such a successful 2024 careers event, we are excited to see how it grows for 2025. Details of next year’s event are on the PM Society website and as we write we have over 260 registrations!
Creativity for Good
Creativity for Good is one of the PM Society’s giving back initiatives which involves a chosen charity having the opportunity to brief a group of interested agencies, about their communication or fundraising needs.
Agencies then pitch their ideas to support the charity to achieve their goals, facilitated by the PM Society. The ongoing support is provided pro-bono to the charity.
We were delighted to work with Acrodysostosis Support and Research as our charity partner for 2024. The number of participating agencies was another staggering increase on the previous year, and we were blown away by the standard of work.
The winner of Creativity for Good 2024 will be announced at the PM Society Awards in March 2025.
Dominic Marchant, the chair of the PM Society and who leads The Creativity for Good initiative said, “the Creativity for Good initiative is now in its 5th year and continues to grow in terms of number of agencies getting involved and the quality of ideas pitched. This year, the challenge was to develop a campaign to increase awareness of acrodysostosis in the medical community so that clinicians can more readily recognise the symptoms and go on to test and ultimately make a diagnosis. We had a record number of agencies expressing an interest to be involved. We’ve increased the team on this initiative – massive thanks to Alex Merckx and Sarah Ralphson for their work in making this year’s process as smooth as possible – and, indeed, we’ve had so much demand from agencies and charities to get involved, we’ve decided to run a second Creativity for Good challenge in 2025. More information on this second competition will be revealed later in the year!”
We also caught up with Nina Knight, the Chair and Founder of Acrodysostosis support and research. “Acrodysostosis is a rare disease, and like many rare conditions, it currently has no treatment or cure. A vital aspect of advancing the science is growing our community. Being chosen by the PM Society for the Creativity for Good campaign to raise awareness has given us an opportunity we could never have achieved on our own. It’s an amazing initiative and we are incredibly grateful to them and to the numerous agencies that applied, making it a very difficult decision to choose just one. Words cannot express what this means for our Acrodysostosis community. The selected agency will genuinely transform the lives of those affected by this condition, now and for generations to come.”
Training
This year the PM Society providing training to over 130 individuals. Our top two courses of 2024 were ‘The Essentials of Pharmaceutical Marketing’ and ‘Pharmaceutical Marketing for Non-Marketers’ and we noticed a trend towards offering more courses in-house for our agencies and pharma companies rather than delegates attending courses in 1s and 2s.
We were delighted to announce the expansion of our courses and the addition of new trainers. This year, we added a new training course ‘How to build strong client relationships’ and welcomed three new trainers to the PM Society: Antoinette Dale Henderson who runs the ‘Boosting Assertiveness & Confidence’ course and the ‘Coaching Essentials’ course; Phil Yates offering the ‘People Management’ course; and Dr Simon Raybould for the ‘Presenting with Credibility and Impact’ course.
Our 2025 training course dates are now available on our website. Keeping in mind the increase of bookings and enquiries for in-houses courses, we have made all PM Society training courses available virtually or face-to-face. We provide bespoke prices for in-house or larger groups and offer our courses to be run as lunch and learns.
Industry events
Women in Pharma is a support community and networking organisation providing resources and events designed to encourage, inspire and support the next generation of women who work in pharma and life sciences.
The PM Society were proud to sponsor the Women in Pharma ‘Inspire! 3’ event back in June. This event featured some influential female industry experts presenting their stories on their careers and experiences in the sector. This was an inspiring event with a great turn out and lots of interesting take aways on our industry.
We are pleased to be sponsoring their upcoming Inspire! 4U event in January. You can register for your tickets on their website.
Advancing standards in 2025
We are excited to see what 2025 will bring with many exciting plans on the horizon. With a successful year for the PM Society, we would like to thank all our members for their continued support and ideas. We hope that this reminds you of all the wonderful work and time our team and members dedicate to advancing standards in our industry.