Pharma, Healthcare Brands Optimistic about Tech and Its Impact on Media Spending
Media spending by big pharma and other healthcare brands is getting better all the time this year. New findings from Mediaocean’s 2024 H2 Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Market Report, based on surveys conducted via Tech Validate in July 2024, say so. The report references data collected from a specific subset of 151 leading pharmaceutical and healthcare advertising industry professionals, which surveyed 1,231 marketers worldwide.
The report said the findings show the “wave of optimism in the pharma/health industry heading into 2024 has continued. Midway through the year, a significant majority [of respondents] again expressed their intention to either maintain or increase their spending in every channel. Beyond macroeconomic conditions, tentpole events such as the summer games in Paris and major advertising cycles like the U.S. presidential election are likely drivers of increased media viewership and social engagement.”
The majority of respondents (70%) indicated their intentions to increase spending across channels such as social media, CTV, and digital/display media. Even print and linear TV channels had a silver lining: while respondents had no intentions of increasing media spending in these channels, in fact, some would spend slightly less, the majority said they’d hold steady in spends.
“Print and TV have long been effective channels for getting the word out about new pharma and healthcare products,” said Aaron Goldman, Chief Marketing Officer of Mediaocean, an omnichannel ad platform. “They also provide a wide-enough canvas to include all the requisite compliance detail. If you think about those pharma commercials that say, ‘see our ad in Men’s Health Magazine,’ that’s one way of leveraging the cross-channel synergy.”
Local spending in the form of OOH and DOOH, remains strong with 66% of respondents saying they will increase spending in these channels, compared to 57% of respondents back in November 2023.
Out-of-home ads provide tremendous context for pharma brands, Goldman said. “Traditional billboards can tie in aspects of physical location – think bad traffic and anxiety meds. And DOOH can incorporate time of day, weather, and other triggers so allergy brands can reference pollen count.”
Retail media saw the biggest spike in projected media spending of all the channels—73% of respondents said they would increase spending in RMNs.
“Retail sales data can be highly correlated to drug and healthcare products,” he explained. “For example, someone buying eczema cream may be interested in a new treatment. By using purchase data for ad targeting, pharma brands can reach relevant consumers without any personally identifiable information or sensitive information in play.”
Marketer/respondents were also not shy about their opinions regarding Generative AI, calling it the most critical consumer technology to have emerged in the past six months. As for their own use of the technology in marketing campaigns, tapping AI in practical use cases such as copywriting and image generation, respondents seemed less enthusiastic. Only 27% said its use is most prevalent in copywriting, while 20% said it was used in image generation.
The most cited area in which AI can be successfully applied, according to respondents, was for research and data analysis.
“While content generation certainly holds the most promise for marketers in terms of unlocking more efficient creative production, adoption will continue to follow responsible training and application of Large Language Models (LLMs),” the report noted. “As for research and analytics, using Gen AI to synthesize data sets and enable natural language prompts to query large databases is paying strong dividends for marketers.”
Even with all the new ad-tech tools and platforms that have emerged in the past two years, the pharma and healthcare sectors have a sustained optimism about media spending and its potential effectiveness. Social media, digital display/video, and CTV remain the fastest growing channels—all reasons for advertisers to maintain or increase their budgets in H2, the report said.
As Gen AI gets more sophisticated at handling large data sets and creating personalized consumer messages that are in alignment with complex healthcare and privacy regulations, the hope is that consumer trust and credibility will also grow in this vertical.
