AstraZeneca

Challenge

In 2020 AstraZeneca needed to position itself as a leader in the pharmaceutical industry as well as better support its brands. The company's newly minted communications branch also needed to prove its efforts back to internal stakeholders.

Shortly after a deal with Oxford University to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market had been signed, Melissa Millard joined AstraZeneca as Head of Communications, at a time when the Australian branch of the organisation had no formal communications function.

"When I first started, I realised that the way news was being shared internally was very limited and that meant there was little oversight into what was going on in our industry and the rest of the world. It's vital that our staff are across relevant news and where we are being mentioned so if our customers ask questions they can speak to the wider context."

For Melissa, she saw this challenge as an opportunity to reframe the way AstraZeneca was constructing its public profile. The announcement that the Australian government had selected AstraZeneca as its primary provider of a COVID-19 vaccine came with a boom of media coverage, making it clear that managing and controlling the brand's media profile had never been more important.

"Part of my remit was looking at our social media policy and strategy. As social media became an increasingly legitimate form of media, we needed a tool that integrated our traditional media monitoring with social media management and listening capabilities.

The deep insights provided by the added social data offered by Meltwater was something that I knew we were going to need. It made sense from a user experience perspective, as well as a cost perspective, to bring them all together."

Solution

In August 2020 AstraZeneca partnered with Meltwater for media monitoring, holistic reporting, and visibility over the social impact of the organisation's communications activities.

Within the early days of Meltwater's first-class onboarding program, Melissa and her team were able to launch an AstraZeneca branded internal newsletter highlighting some of the key content coming through in the Meltwater platform every day.

"The newsletter was a quick and easy win for someone who was new to the job. It provides all of our Australian staff with one central source of truth for relevant breaking news, and the tool allows us to include an executive summary that calls out the most important points as well as any internal announcements."

In the first month of the partnership with Meltwater, the Federal Government announced it had signed a Letter of Intent to purchase doses of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine, if it proved effective. This generated an unprecedented amount of coverage for the company and required the communications team to run quick and reliable analyses across editorial, broadcast, and social media mentions.

"With Meltwater's Explore reporting tool, we were able to extract quick and valuable insights for different teams about the conversations that were surrounding AstraZeneca. Within our Explore reports, we leveraged the Social Echo metric available within Meltwater to identify which news articles were trending online and thus had the greatest impact on public conversation."

With access to Meltwater, AstraZeneca has been able to gain key insights from social conversations and news coverage, and report on this to both internal and external stakeholders.

"Additionally, the Emotional Comparison analysis offered in Explore is incredible. Traditional sentiment analysis doesn't account for the nuances in language, especially in Australia where we are prone to using sarcasm in all types of media. The Emotional Comparison chart gives us a deeper insight into the language used in a news piece or a social post, aligning it with an emotion and allowing us to surmise how people feel about the company and what we are doing in the community."