You hold the client

For agencies and consultancies

Your client has asked for social listening or a read of what AI assistants say about their brand, and you do not run it in-house. The relationship is yours and you want it done right. That is the shape of most of our work.

Not you? See the page for brand teams →

How the partnership runs

You

Own the relationship. Brief the questions. Present the findings, under your name or with ours on the cover.

Starling

Run the platform, read the conversation, produce the outputs. Join the debrief if you want us there; stay invisible if you do not.

Together

Agree the question bank, the comparator set, the adverse-event protocol with your client's safety team, and whose name goes where.

We offer special partner terms for work contracted through you.

What you put in front of your client

A landscape study to open, then answer reports on the rhythm the client chooses, share of voice in social media and in AI answers, event briefs when something happens, and the classified data behind all of it for your own analysts. Every output is built to be forwarded.

Inspect the outputs →

Before you brief us

Public sources only. No closed groups, no gated patient networks, no login-only forums. If a conversation lives behind a login, we say so instead of implying we have it.
Patient and clinician voice is separated by classification after collection, then checked by a person wherever a post carries weight. The search itself cannot tell them apart, and neither can anyone else's.
Two partners plus automation. A landscape study is weeks, not days, and we would rather tell you that than promise a date we cannot hold.
Adverse events are screened continuously and handled to your client's pharmacovigilance protocol by trained readers, forwarded on business days. We do not moderate and we do not run a command centre.
No private individual is ever named in a deliverable. Organisations and public figures only. Source links go into an internal appendix under the agreed protocol.
We never contact your client directly. If they want us in the room for a debrief or the pharmacovigilance set-up, you invite us.

The work

Ongoing monitoring programme

Competitive monitoring in reproductive medicine, run behind a prime

Challenge

A consultancy needed a digital intelligence layer for an ongoing competitive monitoring programme spanning six companies across three continents, including Japan, where market moves appeared in Japanese-language sources weeks before English coverage.

Delivered

Continuous social media monitoring with AI-assisted classification across ten intelligence themes. Monthly briefings, share of voice analysis, alerts, and annual brand factbook contributions. Japanese-language monitoring that surfaced Asia-Pacific signals invisible to English-only programmes.

Result

The consultancy offers fully integrated digital intelligence without hiring social media analysts or licensing monitoring platforms. Signals that took weeks to surface now show up in the monthly read or an event brief.

Benchmark study

A yearly benchmark of pharma on social media

Challenge

Pharmaceutical companies wanted to know how their corporate social media presence compared with their peers, on evidence rather than impressions.

Delivered

An annual benchmark series covering 28 companies and 31 accounts, 700,000 followers segmented into 55 audience groups, and a million posts classified by theme. A ranked report with the moves each company made year on year.

Result

Successive editions were bought by two of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies, and the segmentation method became the base of the classifier Starling still runs.

All selected work →

Japan, covered by specialists

Starling is a Japan specialist in competitive intelligence and healthcare monitoring. Japanese is read fluently in-house by a principal with business relationships in Tokyo and direct access to Japanese patient advocacy organisations, pharma news and social media. That is often where an Asia-Pacific move first shows up, weeks before English coverage, and where English-only programmes go quiet.

It sits on top of full coverage everywhere else. English, German and French are read in-house, and every other language is collected and machine-translated for counting.

For an agency, this is the capability that is hardest to staff in-house. Where your client's programme has a Japan blind spot, the Japanese patient and competitor conversation is a module we switch on for the length of the subscription.

How we charge

A fixed fee for the landscape study, then an annual subscription priced by reporting rhythm, quarterly or monthly, with the platform licence, adverse-event handling and language reading inside it. Partner terms apply to work contracted through an agency. We quote after one call, once the questions are known.

Get in touch

Starling GmbH
Zurich, Switzerland

The person who reads this is the person who runs the work. Expect a reply from one of us, not a form letter.

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