#21: Working on a detail aid

As mentioned in my previous post, a detail aid is a marketing tool that helps your clients to promote their products. Therefore, understanding your clients' needs is the very first step to producing effective detail aids that fit nicely into their product marketing strategies.

Getting a clear brief from client
Before you start the project, most likely you will discuss with your client face-to-face on several aspects. You want to get answers on the following questions:

- What are the specific reasons for having this detail aid?
- Who is the target audience?
- What key messages should the detail aid convey?
- Are there any key published papers that support those messages?
- What kind of design style does your client like?
- What are the design elements to be included (eg, colors, images, photos, illustrations, logos)?

Where is the content?
Content in a detail aid comes from a variety of sources pertaining to the particular product.

Usually your client will provide the related materials, such as product monograph, existing detail aids, clinical papers, or abstracts from scientific conferences. Reading these materials carefully will help you understand their product better. You will also be turning some of the data and facts from those materials into content of the detail aid.

At times, materials provided may not be sufficient or up to date, you then need to do some research yourself. Start searching for review papers and clinical papers (the more recent the better) with PubMed.

How to ‘utilize’ the clinical papers
From clinical papers, you can:

1. Extract key results from the abstract.
2. Use the introduction to set the scene for the detail aid.
3. Get in-depth details and figures or charts from the study results.
4. Use the discussion to emphasize the significance of the key results.

Plan your story
The next thing you need to do is to plan a story for the detail aid.

Using a conventional 4-page detail aid as example, this is how you can divide the detail aid into different sections.

Page 1: The detail aid cover, usually carries an eye-catching design and title.

Pages 2 and 3: Spread the content between these two pages. For example, set the scene with an introduction to the disease or treatment concept, followed with drug product characteristics, efficacy and safety, data of which are supported by clinical papers.

Page 4: Keep the top part of this page for conclusion. You can use bulleted points to summarize the key information presented in the main content. Other things like product shot, references and logos are placed at the bottom part of the page.

Depending on the number of pages available, emphasis of the detail aid, or the amount of data you have, you may adjust the story or flow accordingly.

As with other projects, you and the designer are very likely to make a few rounds of changes based on your client’s comments before the detail aid can be finally approved for printing.