Publicis Health Media president Andrea Palmer looks back at 10 years of pharma media — and meteoric changes

10 Feb 2023
endpts.com
Ten years ago, pharma advertising media went something like this: TV, traditional media and maybe some Facebook pages. Fast forward to today, and while TV and traditional print and radio are still media campaign components, social media and digital advertising have skyrocketed. Andrea Palmer, CEO of Publicis Health Media (PHM), which debuted 10 years ago as a pharma and healthcare media buying agency, remembers those days well. Pharma companies’ social media revolved around Facebook pages, although with comments disabled and staying far away from user-generated content. That’s a world away from the current pharma social media scene where social influencers across a wide range of platforms engage with and for pharma brands and companies. “Pharma has gone from risk averse … to figuring out ways to get into these channels in a compliant manner because it’s consumer behavior – the way people consume information and the way people learn,” she said in a recent interview with Endpoints News . “In what I would consider a fairly short time frame of only 10 years, we’ve moved from pretty much one end of the spectrum to very much the other end.” The increasing level of sophistication in pharma marketing and media led PHM to launch a formalized content practice to build better branded engagements, Palmer said, with strategies in areas including branded entertainment, video and audio content. Pharma companies’ once “enormous appetite for more traditional models” hasn’t completely disappeared. But it has evolved from almost all linear TV, that is, television viewing at broadcast or cable channel programmed times, to a broad distribution model through connected TV through online and streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. Traditional media buyers who were “A-plus negotiators” in the marketplace, as Palmer said, are being replaced by digital and social media aces. “Our team of video buyers looks so different today. They are digital natives, they’re data driven and they’re fluent in things like programmatic, and now they’re translating those skills into placing video,” she said. The need for data expertise is due in part to a boom there as well — today one-third of the world’s data is health data, PHM notes. What’s coming in the next 10 years is difficult to predict, of course. As Palmer said, “I wouldn’t have guessed 10 years ago we’d be talking about ChatGPT, so geez, can you imagine what are the next 10 years going to look like?” She did point to more immediate trends, though, and one she regards as a major trend is access to healthcare changes. That includes moves such as Amazon and other new players entering into healthcare, clinical trials becoming more decentralized and retailers moving into the clinic space. “That has a lot of potential influence on where the next 10 years takes us from a media influence perspective. Does that change the way pharma marketers talk about their brands? Unlikely, but I do think it’ll change the way that we look to make connections with patients and I’ll be interested to see how and if that changes the go to market strategies,” Palmer said.
For more details,please visit the original website
The content of the article does not represent any opinions of Synapse and its affiliated companies. If there is any copyright infringement or error, please contact us, and we will deal with it within 24 hours.
Organizations
Indications
-
Targets
-
Drugs
-
Get started for free today!
Accelerate Strategic R&D decision making with Synapse, PatSnap’s AI-powered Connected Innovation Intelligence Platform Built for Life Sciences Professionals.
Start your data trial now!
Synapse data is also accessible to external entities via APIs or data packages. Leverages most recent intelligence information, enabling fullest potential.