MARKETING AND MEDIA TRENDS REPORT 2024

Hear from Health Marketers Across the Industry
It’s an exciting time for health marketing. Our industry is in a sustained state of innovation, with marketers increasing their use of technology and data to meet the needs of the evolving consumer and HCP.

From our perspective at PulsePoint, this past year was the year of media consolidation. While marketers continued to experiment with diversified media channels, new audience targets, and new measurement approaches, the underlying trend was toward consolidating media execution, with the goal of enabling the management of end-to-end journeys, streamlining cross-channel reach, and minimizing redundancy and waste.

As we turn the corner to 2024, what does the new year hold for our industry? To shed light on this question, PulsePoint interviewed brand marketers, agency executives, media strategists, traders, and technologists across the pharmaceutical marketing sector. Specifically, we wanted to understand where marketing priorities lie. This report compiles the perspectives of these industry-leading experts. Through these interviews, we’ve identified four key themes for 2024.

Keep reading!
1
Experimentation with AI for marketing

It’s impossible to escape the snowballing of AI across many different aspects of business and daily life. As this inescapable shift to AI gains momentum, our experts evaluated whether pharma marketing is ready to take the plunge and where AI will first make its impact.

KEY THEMES
2
Exploration into omnichannel for the consumer

The industry has made great strides in omnichannel marketing to the healthcare professional audience. Omnichannel marketing to the consumer audience should be the next logical wave of development. But is omnichannel for DTC even possible, given the need for consumer privacy protection? Our experts weighed in.

KEY THEMES
3
New ways to break through customer inattention

The average attention span of a person is decreasing, mostly due to the always-on nature of technology. The more people are on their devices, the greater reach we have to our customers, but the lower their engagement with our messaging. The industry has started to adapt, changing their tactics to better engage this increasingly distracted customer.

KEY THEMES
4
Boom in marketing analytics

Return on ad spend has always been a focus for marketers. Current advances in the availability of real-world data from EMRs/EHRs, device and disease registries, and digital therapeutic apps can push marketing analytics to the next level. Marketers are excited about the new value this is creating. 

The simple definition of artificial intelligence (AI) is machines or technology acting in ways that seem intelligent. We are already using AI in the background of pharma marketing. For example, companies like Google, Meta, and even PulsePoint use AI to create audiences and select keywords and placements to maximize conversions for brands.

There are other areas in marketing where newer versions of generative AI and deep learning models can deliver impact, such as creative development, message personalization, CRM management, and predictive analytics. Marketers are starting to incorporate AI into many different aspects of their strategic and operational plans. To understand which aspects of AI are commanding marketing dollars, we asked the experts.

Brad Fox
VP of Media, Dentsu
AI to Power User-Level Data
“A potential immediate benefit for pharma when it comes to AI is the understanding and processing of large data sets to help identify trends and understand user behavior. Agencies and clients alike sit on significant volumes of non-identifiable user-level data (i.e., Adserver Log Reports), which AI could be leveraged to analyze and identify trends (i.e., time of day/day of week with highest engagement).“
Kristy Quagliariello
Vice President, 
Programmatic Media, Klick
Taking AI to the Next Level
“AI has become such a buzzword and many people aren't using it in the proper context, especially in programmatic advertising. We've been using AI and machine learning for years and our team is focused on using AI to help marketers enhance their decision-making.

For example, what type of AI can make consumer and HCP marketing more synergistic? Can AI help our teams be more efficient given we're marketing drugs with multiple indications? Is there a way that AI can help inform dynamic creative or targeting? There's a lot of potential uses in programmatic for AI. We look forward to seeing what companies like PulsePoint do to make that AI actionable.“
Mark Pappas
EVP, Innovation, CMI Media Group
AI for Optimization
“When most people refer to AI, most of the interest revolves around generative AI and creative development. AI is something that is also leveraged behind the scenes in optimizing campaigns. In that sense, pharma is more than ready for AI and is already embracing it. AI is already making an impact behind the scenes optimizing campaigns using KPIs to develop campaign-specific models to improve performance.”
Scott Ensign
Chief Strategy Officer, Butler/Till
AI for Creative
“The regulatory concerns in the pharma marketing space pose a particular challenge for a technology like generative AI. Many of the benefits of broader automation like dynamic creative and personalization have been slower to make their way to pharma marketing because of the highly regulated nature of the space. We expect adoption of generative AI to be markedly slower in the pharma marketing space than in other industries.

Despite the regulatory challenges, I think creative will be impacted first. The weight of regulation has caused such a dearth of creative assets that there is a real hunger to solve this problem. Marketers will find ways to leverage this technology to make pharma creative better. We're using AI across the organization. We've been experimenting for a while with applications for things like copywriting and coding, and we're working to incorporate it into all of the work we do to be more efficient and effective in our everyday tasks. We have plans to create new experiences for our employee-owners and our clients with the promise of generative AI.”
Ann Bilyew
EVP, Health, and President, Healthcare Solutions Group, WebMD
AI for Personalization
“We are using AI to fine-tune our ability to personalize our calls to action to guide consumers toward next best actions. By combining cutting-edge technology with data that allows us to plan each user’s next best engagement, we are able to influence consumers along their journeys to better health, and to measure their progress through the HIPAA-compliant data collected as they move through our AI-enabled solutions.”

According to McKinsey’s The State of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s Breakout Year survey report,

0
%
of people surveyed said they’ve had at least some exposure to generative AI
0
%
regularly use it in their work

The technology industry leads in the adoption of AI, with the healthcare and energy industries lagging. Of all the reported uses of generative AI, marketing and sales tops the list, followed by product/service development and service operations.

Reported Exposure to Generative AI Tools

Advanced Industries
5
11
16
47
15
5
Business, legal, and professional services
7
16
13
41
21
2
Consumer goods/retail
7
11
12
40
26
4
Energy and materials
6
8
15
50
19
3
Financial services
8
16
18
41
14
4
Healthcare, pharma, and medical products
6
10
17
44
15
7
Technology, media, and telecom
14
19
17
37
9
3
Regularly use for work
Regularly use for work and outside of work
Regularly use outside of work
Have tried at least once
No exposure
Don't know

Omnichannel marketing refers to an approach where the marketer reaches and engages with their customer seamlessly across channels. With true omnichannel marketing, all channels work together as one. This approach delivers customer-centric experiences as well as deep efficiency and accountability for the marketer. 

Omnichannel marketing requires that the marketer be able to identify the customer longitudinally across the various media they use. Consumer data privacy laws, such as HIPAA, HITECH, and CCPA, as well as the deprecation of the cookie, have made omnichannel DTC challenging. Marketers therefore chose to focus on the healthcare professional instead, leveraging rich first-party NPI-level data to build omnichannel engagement. 

2024 will be the year to tackle omnichannel DTC. Marketers are now willing to explore ways they can implement omnichannel marketing for the consumer. To understand where the initial forays are happening, we talked to the people on the front lines.

BRAD FOX
VP of Media, Dentsu
Inherent Challenges
“With the current consumer privacy laws, I find that it is difficult to execute true omnichannel marketing strategies for DTC/consumer audiences. Without the complete understanding of which consumers are being reached and where, it will continue to be a challenge to identify the effectiveness of multi-channel impact on an individual consumer’s journey. By leveraging the same 3P audience segments across multiple channels, partners and platforms, teams can work in the direction of omnichannel activations by targeting the same audiences in multiple places. However, the true understanding of all touchpoints with an individual user that is critical to successful omnichannel marketing will continue to be a challenge in the current privacy climate.”
Glenniss Richards
Sr. Director, Digital Media Activation, Bayer
Omnichannel vs Multichannel
“Omnichannel is possible in pharma, assuming a strategy to collect first-party data was deployed. But are you truly able to scale and drive impactful performance for the Brand? The answer is NO, because of the privacy limitations.
‍
What’s possible and scalable is a robust multi-channel strategy that leverages modeled audiences that look like ideal individuals who would benefit from your treatments. Strategizing and activating a campaign across multiple channels while ensuring there is a holistic measurement approach is critical. This approach requires multiple teams internally and externally working with a clearly defined target frequency. Ongoing optimizations and review of overlap across channels are critical to success alongside appropriate messaging and content per placement.”
Konrad Gerszke
EVP, Platforms and Markets, Internet Brands
Cohorts, not Individuals
“Is omnichannel for DTC possible with consumer privacy issues? Generally speaking, yes … provided we are looking at consumer/patient segments or cohorts, and not aiming to reach/target consumers/patients 1:1. Also, staying on top of the rapidly changing identity landscape to maintain addressability (at the cohort or segment level) is key to being able to communicate and engage with the consumer/patient in a relevant way.”
Rose Sumrall
Senior Director, Programmatic, Underscore Marketing
DTC–HCP Crosswalk
“With the introduction of clean rooms, this is more possible than ever if companies take the time to build the infrastructures to support a true omnichannel approach. In the meantime, one way we've started approaching this is correlating HCP reach and the halo effects on patients when leveraging location-based targeting. What is the halo-effect essentially when we've exposed the HCP and the patient tied to that HCP based on their visitation habits, script writing habits and developing theories on the impact of media to script writing and awareness. Another approach we've begun testing is leveraging smart lists across DTC targeting as a way of refining the audience and ensuring we're reaching the right patient.”
Kristy Quagliariello
Vice President, 
Programmatic Media, Klick
Single Platform
“We're at the point where a majority of our digital buying across almost all channels is on a single platform where we're running against the same audiences, and we're able to control our frequency caps and ensure that we're not overexposing our audiences to messaging. We can also make sure that we’re reaching the most valuable individuals versus in the past when you're working in a silo, there's a lot of inefficiencies and waste.”
Tricia Savio
VP, Programmatic Practice Lead, EVERSANA INTOUCH MEDIA
All About Consent
“Similar to how a consumer can decide in a non-pharma brand interaction if it’s worth the exchange of providing a brand their phone number and opt-into receiving text messages—patients will have something to gain by providing their consent. Consent will be a currency of sorts and even if the volume of those who consent is smaller, it’s going to be more powerful because it includes a level of intention or openness to the dialogue with a brand. The current path to conversion highlights the importance of omni and channel mix.  We can already do sequential messaging, which is a nice entry point into a fuller omni solution.”   

OMNICHANNEL FOR THE HCP

Omnichannel marketing targeting the healthcare professional made significant progress in 2023. Marketers found that having the right technology platform in place enabled them to gather information about healthcare professionals’ behaviors and interaction patterns, leverage this data to tailor the timing and customization of touchpoints, and unify and automate media management and content delivery across ALL channels. 

If you’re looking to learn how to do omnichannel HCP marketing, download this practical guide.

NEW WAYS TO BREAK THROUGH CONSUMER INATTENTION

Consumers are interacting with many more media channels, always on and forever multitasking. This is creating a paradox for marketers: People are more reachable 24/7, but they’re not necessarily paying attention. In fact, inattention has reached “epidemic” levels, according to an attention expert.

Furthermore, according to Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer, Butler/Till, “We've more or less reached peak media consumption. With consumers spending more than 12 hours per day with media according to eMarketing, there just aren't that many more waking hours in the day. Time spent and engagement are different things, though, and there is a lot of disengaged media consumption. That represents an opportunity for pharma and other marketers to do things differently.” 

Another issue, raised by Ann Bilyew, EVP, Health, and President, Healthcare Solutions Group, WebMD, is that we’re all bombarding consumers from every direction. “Marketing is deployed with insights from increasingly granular data. Social media and entertainment make use of the same tools. The cumulative effect can leave consumers feeling bombarded by information and choices at every turn. This challenge is an opportunity to change the way we think about attention.” 

How are pharma marketers responding to this saturation of consumer attention? We asked the industry how they are planning to break through to the distracted consumer.

‍Find out what they said.

Rose Sumrall
Senior Director, Programmatic, Underscore Marketing
Creative–Media Collaboration
“Consumers are less engaged with the media. The media landscape is more cluttered than ever. So how do we as marketers truly find the right way to engage with them without being intrusive? Consumers don't want traditional ads that are marketed to the masses. Personalization and making them feel heard and seen is key. Integrating more seamlessly with their digital lives is critical. Creative and media need to work much more closely together now than they ever have before. More clients are asking for media's input on the creative side as well as asking, ‘What have others seen work well versus not?’”
Ann Bilyew
EVP, Health, and President, Healthcare Solutions Group, WebMD
Personalization
“In our current content ecosystem, the way to keep users engaged is to provide the insight they crave to navigate the complexity of the healthcare experience with ease. Through personalized, intuitive, and consumer-oriented products—such as our new HealthAdvisor risk assessments based on our propensity models—we optimize outcomes and provide real value for our clients and their customers.”
Michael Caruso
Vice President, Biddable Media, SSCG Media Group
Context is King
“I think customers are becoming more engaged with the media and content that resonates the most with them. At SSCG, we believe context is king, and being able to leverage accurate targeting and continually optimize our media buys based on relevance to the audience and creative that is working best for each channel allows us to capitalize on that higher degree of engagement.”
Andrew Miller
EVP, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
Focus on Higher Impact Channels
“We’re experiencing a continued rise in video content and streaming services that present relatively cost-efficient ways for brands to reach audiences. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are seeing significant growth indicating a preference for short-form, personalized engaging video content. Streaming services are also growing, taking share away from traditional linear TV as the convenience of accessing content on demand rises. We’re seeing mergers and bundling like Hulu/ESPN+/Disney+ as well as more recent announcements like Apple/Paramount emerge with some opening ad supported tiers resulting in new opportunities for brands to engage with their audiences. These audiences also expect personalized experiences further adding fuel to the AI and machine learning fires. These tools can be used to analyze user behavior and preferences, allowing platforms to deliver tailored content, ads, and recommendations.”
Kristy Quagliariello
Vice President, 
Programmatic Media, Klick
Lean into the Multitasking Behavior
“There's so much competition for people’s attention. How do we break through and determine what is resonating with specific audiences? We recently leveraged a QR code for a streaming spot, and saw so much more engagement with that call to action than we did with the 1-800 number in the past. It's just one example of how marketers can find creative ways to minimize friction between seeing the ad and completing a desired action."
Maria Simeone
Vice President, Marketing, PulsePoint
Lean away from Multitasking Behavior
“On the PulsePoint platform, we’re adding channels where we can reach people when we can expect a higher share of attention, such as audio, digital out-of-home, gaming, and sports experiences. Traders can now build these touchpoints into their overall plans. Other things we’re leaning into are formats that combine video, sound, and graphics to increase the breakthrough power of the ad. And we’re watching how other verticals are leveraging the impact of non-standard formats like influencer marketing and product placement when deployed as part of a comprehensive strategy.”
Scott Ensign
Chief Strategy Officer, Butler/Till
Aim for Effectiveness over Efficiency
“We need to change the way we measure and activate media. The focus on efficiency has diluted the effectiveness of advertising messages. We need to get comfortable with a future where there will be fewer impression opportunities that cost more and deliver the genuine connections for which audiences have been starved. This will require heavy innovation from media and creative to shift from seeking cheap spaces to finding the critical spaces where advertising will have a chance to do what we all really want it to do—forge genuine connection.”

What’s holding Gen Z’s attention?

If the younger generation is our canary in the coal mine, signaling where overall behaviors are headed, then marketers need to take notice of this data from eMarketer. On platforms that attract and retain younger customers, the dominant ad format is shorter than 15 seconds, some as short as 3 seconds. As our collective behaviors start to evolve in this direction, we’re going to have to rethink the way our brands interact with our audiences. 

Social Platforms Shape Gen Z Ad Expectations

U.S. Gen Z vs. Non-Gen Z
Platform Users, 2022
Dominant
Ad Format
Snapchat
50%
50%
3-15 Seconds
TikTok
44%
56%
9-15 Seconds
Instagram
31%
69%
15 Seconds
YouTube
25%
75%
6-15 Seconds
CTV
22%
78%
15-30 Seconds
Linear TV
18%
82%
30 Seconds
Facebook
16%
84%
15 Seconds
% of Gen Z users
% of non-Gen Z users

The discipline of marketing analytics is going through a transformation. Traditionally, the end goal of analytics was to evaluate marketing performance and equip marketers with enough information to make responsible investment decisions.

But as the speed and granularity of performance analytics keep increasing, and marketing technology platforms gain the ability to use these analytics to make changes to marketing campaigns mid-flight, in real time, analytics is evolving from being a marketing output to becoming a core marketing input. As this transformation takes place, we’ll see the line between marketing and analytics completely disappear.

At the same time, there is a decelerating force affecting marketing analytics. With the sunsetting of cookies, the industry is having to navigate across a number of ID solutions, device-level versus person-level identifiers, and disconnected data sets (internal CRM and behavioral data, outcomes data, etc.). Will this muddy analytics landscape hold marketers back? Or will we see new investment that shapes and grows the field? 

Where is pharma in all of this change? We talked to people on the front lines to find out. In a nutshell, 2024 is likely to be a boom year for analytics. 

Glenniss Richards
Sr. Director, Digital Media Activation, Bayer
In-Market, Mid-Flight Measurement
“In the organizations I’ve worked with, there has always been a focus on ensuring all media tests and evergreen campaigns included a measurement plan with timely data available to pivot as needed based on market trends. The advancements in in-platform measurement is certainly closing the gap of what’s been missing for marketing analytics. Any data that is as close to real time that can support the ongoing media optimizations is beneficial to the brand and the targeted audiences.”
Leanne Smith
EVP, Data Strategy & Governance, CMI Media Group
AI to Measure Performance
“Given the trends towards planning and optimizing at the granularity of creative, target and time, understanding what the next best message to send is, the usage of AI to measure performance and make those decisions is the largest emerging trend in pharma marketing measurement.

As the usage of AI increases in decision-making of the marketing budgets and optimizations, ensuring the data being fed into those models is clean and organized is paramount. There is a trend across organizations to ensure strict data governance and the enhancement of metadata around marketing metrics in order to allow them to use the emerging technologies. Without clean data, it is ‘garbage in, garbage out.’”
Konrad Gerszke
EVP, Platforms and Markets, Internet Brands
New Year, New Metrics
“We are anticipating a rather large step back around the metrics marketers are using to measure outcomes/impact. This is partially triggered by the need to replace current metrics (driven by 3PC deprecation, etc.). But it is even more impacted by the need to be more effective and efficient in allocating marketing budgets. Measurement metrics need to be re-aligned with the goal of the campaign to better reflect the intended behavior change the campaign is attempting to influence.”
Andrew Stark
Chief Client Officer, PulsePoint
Advances in Real World Data
“First there was the democratization of claims data, which transformed the face of pharma marketing. Now, advances in real-world data include EMRs/EHRs, device and disease registries, and, thanks to smartphones and digital therapeutic apps, biometrics and patient-generated data. These are becoming more of a factor in how brands proactively design and execute marketing campaigns.”

Follow the Money

According to Gartner’s research on the State of Marketing Budget and Strategy in 2022, insights and analytics command the largest portion of marketing’s non-media spend at 26%. 

Average Budget Allocations to Marketing's Programs and Operational Areas

Campaign Creation and Management
10.1%
Brand Strategy and Activation
9.7%
Marketing Operations
9.6%
Demand Generation/Sales Enablement
9.5%
Digital Commerce
9.4%
Mobile Site/App Dev. and Maintenance
9.0%
Web Design/UX
9.0%
Marketing Data and Analytics
9.0%
Customer Analytics
8.8%
Marketing Insight
8.3%
Loyalty Program Management
7.6%
A special Thank You to our participants!

PulsePoint would like to extend a special thank you to the founders, executives, marketers, physicians, and clinicians from the below organizations who participated in our report by sharing their insights and perspectives.

PulsePoint is a leading technology company that uses real-world data in real-time to optimize campaign performance and revolutionize health decision-making. 

Leveraging proprietary datasets and methodology, PulsePoint targets healthcare professionals and consumer populations with an unprecedented level of accuracy—delivering unparalleled results to the clients we serve. 

The company is now a part of Internet Brands, a KKR portfolio company and owner of WebMD Health Corp. For more information, visit pulsepoint.com.