Giving pharmaceutical companies what they want from their PR agency.

Martin Palin. MD and Founder, Palin Communications

What do Australian pharmaceutical companies really want from their communications partners? Do they want their agencies to be versed in AI and rich in cool tech tools? Or do they want strategic guidance, reliable service and industry knowledge?

As the founder of an agency that specialises in health PR, the question of what pharmaceutical clients really want is one that has kept me awake on many a restless night.

I’ve slept a bit better to be honest after the release of AusDoc’s recent survey of 26 pharma and biotech professionals which asked them about the most important attributes of their communications suppliers.

Turns out that AI and technology expertise “ranked dead last”. According to AusDoc, “… what moves the needle is still fundamentally human: strategic clarity, reliable service, genuine partnership, and the confidence that comes from knowing a client’s world as well as they do.”

We’ve been asking our clients these kinds of questions and coming to similar answers for many years. We do an annual client survey and regular project debriefs to tease out the drivers of client satisfaction (and dissatisfaction in some cases).

Using the Net Promoter Score format, we ask clients (on a scale of 1 to 10) how likely they are to recommend us to colleagues. For clients that give us a 9 or 10 we follow up with “Why did you score us high”, while for clients who score us below 9 we follow up with “What would we need to improve to score higher”

The results essentially mirror the AusDoc findings.

Personal client service always comes out on top. In our latest 2025 survey, three quarters of the 44 clients we spoke to in person said they rated us so highly because we were “responsive and reliable”.

The next highest scores were our ability to leverage commercial insights, mastery of health communications and the fact that strategies were “tailored” rather than being generated out of some kind of “cookie cutter”.

The message is clear. They want agencies that use their industry knowledge and specific insights around the specific challenges faced by individual companies to deliver strategic value - and to deliver all of that in a “responsive and reliable” way.

None of this is to downplay the reality that AI is re-shaping the way PR agencies deliver their services and derive their insights. But the real value is human. If a client is pleased to see their CEO do a live TV news interview and nail their key messages to a massive national audience, then I’m pretty sure you can assume it wasn’t a robot that negotiated with the news producer and got the spokesperson into the studio, briefed and on time.

The broader challenge for PR teams is to build the “agency brain” and embed strategic value into every client interaction that goes on in our business. It takes a 'strategically senior-led team' to deliver that kind of value to clients. This is because they want to build genuine connections and relationships with experienced agency people who are deeply specialised and know what they are talking about.

That’s what we’ve been trying to do in recent years at Palin Communications. Now we’re developing the research base to confirm we’re on the right track.

Not every new professional service business makes it. Among those who don’t quite crack it will be a few that made an important mistake. Their assumption about what clients really wanted was wrong. It’s a mistake I’ve been trying to avoid for nearly 30 years.