Six questions to ask before you brief a pharmaceutical event agency

A good pharmaceutical event agency will answer these six questions quickly and specifically. Vague answers are usually the first sign of problems that surface later, in content review, regulatory sign off or the archive.

Most production companies can take a brief, run the logistics and deliver what was asked. With pharmaceutical events, the trouble tends to arrive afterwards. These are the questions we'd ask if we were the ones briefing.

For the questions that apply to any event, see our general guide to briefing an event production company.

1. How do you handle content that needs different regulatory framing for different markets watching the same event?

A session filmed in one country and streamed to field teams in several others can fall under several sets of rules at once. A strong answer describes checking content for each market's requirements in pre production, and flagging issues before anything is filmed.

2. How many rounds of medical, legal and regulatory review do you build in by default?

Review is where schedules break. Listen for a real number, and for where those rounds sit in the plan: medical for scientific and safety accuracy, legal for contractual and liability risk, regulatory for each market's rules, and corporate communications for messaging and brand. "As many as you need" usually means nobody has planned for it.

3. Do you use scientific interpreters, or generalist conference interpreters?

A generalist can be an excellent interpreter and still stumble over a mechanism of action or a dosing term, and the doctors in the room will notice. The right answer is interpreters who specialise in the therapeutic area, briefed in advance, with the technical setup built around them.

4. How do you plan filming around archive and compliance needs?

Footage from a pharmaceutical event may need to work as a regulatory record, as continuing medical education material or as an internal compliance file. Format, resolution and metadata have to be decided before filming starts, so a good partner will ask where the content needs to end up at the brief stage.

5. What happens when content needs to be refilmed or reedited after review?

It happens, even on well run projects. A good answer covers how time is held back in the schedule for changes, and how they're handled without a surprise invoice.

6. Which pharmaceutical or healthcare clients have you delivered for, and what did those events involve?

Names matter less than specifics. Ask what kind of events, how many markets, and what went wrong and how it was fixed. Experienced teams usually have a story ready.

How we answer them

We're always glad to be asked all six. We produce medical conferences, product launches and hybrid broadcasts for pharmaceutical and healthcare clients including AstraZeneca, Novartis and Roche, drawing on 90+ years of production across 80+ countries. Our pharmaceutical events page has our guide to each of these areas, or you can get in touch to talk through your brief.

FAQs

What should I ask a pharmaceutical event agency before briefing them? How they handle different regulatory rules across markets, how many review rounds they plan for, whether they use scientific interpreters, how they plan for the archive, what happens when content needs changing after review, and which pharmaceutical clients they've worked with.

When should medical, legal and regulatory review be planned into an event? From the first brief, with each round given its own place in the schedule.

Why do pharmaceutical events need specialist interpreters? Because therapeutic area terminology needs to be exact, and generalist interpreters can lose accuracy on the terms that matter most to a medical audience.