If Another Agency Could Give You This Strategy, Stop

I heard some stories about clients issuing RFPs and getting the same strategies back from different agencies. That should make us pause. As AI becomes part of strategy development, how much are we questioning what comes back?

We know this is "a thing," and yet there are still a lot of places where people are using AI and not questioning the responses. Gotta move fast, after all.

I've written about the pharma playbooks, and how they are starting to get played out and we need different answers. Here's the real truth: if you use AI for your launch strategy, it will pull from the playbooks. Because that's what it learned from. A launch might be complicated versus complex — depends on the category, the novelty of the MOA, market realities. Neil Perkin wrote about this distinction — go read it. And AI can be helpful here, as it can look across a lot of different things at the same time. But sometimes it really is complex, and that's where the real value of your strategists come in. You have to know what questions to ask.

We're asking LLMs to help us build new playbooks. But without specific context, competing perspectives, and a willingness to question the output, we risk getting the old playbook back with some of our words in it.

So let's talk watchouts:

-- If you can swap the product name and the strategy still holds, you need to push further. It's a launch strategy, not your launch strategy for your product.

-- If there are no open questions and everything is nice and tidy — that's a red flag. The world doesn't work that way, especially not these days.

-- If there's language that can apply to anything — "we need to ensure good patient access," "we need to change HCP behaviors" — that's too flat. Make it specific.

-- If the strategy never tells you what you won't do, push further. Which audience takes priority? Which barrier matters most? Where will you concentrate resources, and what will you leave aside?

-- If another agency could give you the same strategy — stop. An agency's real strength is the people that work for it, the experiences they had, and how that shapes their approaches. Yes, there are some things that will be common. But look for that nuance.

A quick gut check: these watchouts are about the complex situations. If your launch is more complicated than complex, think a fast-follower in an established category, a “playbook” answer isn't automatically wrong. The red flag is when you're facing something genuinely new — a novel MOA, an unprecedented access landscape — and you're still getting the same flat solution back.

We can use the LLMs to come up with new innovative strategies, but it still takes work and perspective. A challenger agency like P10 will help you question the assumptions that could be given to you by anyone. It may be uncomfortable at times. But it's in service of better health outcomes. And that’s what we’re all here for.