Engagement strategy is the practice, not a deliverable.
Engagement is not a deliverable; it is what the strategy should answer.
How the practice shows up
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The question, before the channel.
Where the audience actually is decides what gets built. The channel mix is the answer, not the brief.
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The journey, not the campaign.
A touchpoint is only useful when it connects to the ones before and after it. Engagement strategy is the through-line.
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The constraint, as the case.
The tightest constraints — regulatory, behavioral, attention — are where the practice either stands or collapses. That's where it gets tested.
Work
Case studies are held under client confidentiality. Each card previews a sector and the kind of strategic artifact the work produced — click any card to request access.
About
I practice engagement strategy for pharmaceutical brand teams — building content systems and AI that scale brand engagement under regulatory review.
My current focus is engagement strategy and content systems for pharmaceutical and consumer brand teams. Over 15+ years across the OHG/IPG network, I've built content systems and engagement properties that span single-brand and portfolio scale — including the Keytruda modular content system originally piloted on lung HCP and adopted across indications, the AstraZeneca Imfinzi oncology-portfolio triage site, and the Novartis MS-portfolio triage site that did the same. Across each, I shaped engagement strategies that guided brand teams through tradeoffs between compliance, audience, and outcomes. Recent work centers on AI-driven content systems that scale across indications and brand contexts.
My path to engagement strategy came through systems thinking — a BA in international relations from Stony Brook University and a master's in technical systems management from its College of Engineering. Before UX, I spent four years in Shenzhen as a business analyst, working cross-border supply-chain problems where production, quality, and cross-cultural negotiation all happened simultaneously. What ties the arc together is a particular fluency with complex systems — cultural, operational, technical, regulatory — and a discipline of translating complexity into clarity at the scale required. I came to UX through Stanford's d.school design-thinking program and HCI coursework, both online, in 2013, then built my career across New York agencies — pharma at Havas Lynx and Health for Brands, consumer at DDB and Isobar, with a steady concentration into pharma marketing at CDM and Wildtype. The expertise I've built is in designing the engagement systems that carry clinical complexity, regulatory constraint, and audience behavior together.
One example: at Wildtype on Merck's Keytruda (2021–2024), I was on the team that designed a modular content system — atomic content blocks composed into modules, bundled by communication objective, and assembled into templates per channel: branded, unbranded, or third-party. We piloted it on lung HCP first, then carried it through MLR approval. The approval required educating MLR on how the modules and templates fit together, and codifying which modules required which safety information. We coached other indication teams on how the framework worked as adoption spread across the brand. That kind of architecture is what makes AI-driven content systems possible in pharma — the same modular logic that earns regulatory approval is what AI assembly needs to scale without resubmission.
An engineering principle I carry: structure decides what scales. In regulated content, that means the architecture has to clear regulators, work for brand teams, and hold audience trust before AI can do anything useful. With that structure in place, AI becomes leverage. Without it, AI becomes risk dressed up as productivity.
The teams I want to join take the architecture seriously — where what I build has to clear regulators, earn audience trust, and scale by its own logic.
Contact
- mniola@outlook.com
- linkedin.com/in/marcniola
Usually within 48 hours.