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Digital disruption is forcing a reevaluation of how to connect with patients. Responding to a series of major events—from upheaval at Twitter to the phasing out of third-party cookies—brands are adopting nimbler, more data-driven models that empower them to quickly switch tactics as the operating environment changes and they learn which approaches work best.

Amy Patel, Phreesia’s Director of Analytics, discussed this transforming landscape on a Digital Pharma East 2023 panel that weighed the best ways to reach patients in a world that is “increasingly complex, ever-changing and full of more and more obstacles and challenges,” as she described it.

The phasing out of third-party cookies was a major panel focus. Deprived of a resource that has long been a cornerstone of online engagement, teams now are putting more emphasis on collecting first-party data with consent. Lisa Frankina, Director of Digital Marketing for VIVITROL® at Alkermes, explained how her company works to build trust so that patients feel comfortable sharing their data.

“You want to connect with your audience and emotionally connect with patients,” Frankina said. “What we try to do is amplify the patient voice with first-hand testimonials—a video of someone who has actually been in that position—so that the content is relatable in order to make that authentic connection.”

In the previous, cookie-enabled world, brands could put their materials in front of patients no matter where they were on the internet. Lacking that option today, Natalie Wills, Associate Director of Marketing at Blueprint Medicines, is rethinking how Blueprint can ensure that patients see its content. Some of the new questions her team is asking include: “Where are patients looking for information? Are there ways we can reach patients outside of relying on cookies and data? Where we can put articles out there in the world where patients can find us and come to us?” Wills said.

Brands need a range of ways to connect with patients—and be willing to activate, optimize and switch tactics mid-campaign, the panel agreed. Grace Rodriguez, Head of DTC Portfolio Marketing, iPVU at UCB, described how those necessities manifest at her company.

“Having that nimbleness to really ensure that we are optimizing our spend and reaching those patients, while getting all of the data that we can to really tell that story, is pretty much No. 1 for us,” Rodriguez said. “What are those KPIs per channel, per tactic, per partner? If we’re not delivering on that, then you optimize or you move on.”

The capacity to pivot quickly is reshaping the media-planning cycle, too. The panelists explained that they now continually monitor how different aspects of a campaign are performing and adjust their approach as necessary throughout the year.

“We’ve built more flexibility into our media plans this year than in any year I ever have worked in this space,” said Jack Vance, Managing Director of Data and Activation at SOLVE(D), An IPG Health Company. “Every one of these media plans has a bucket of dollars, and we say ‘We’re going to decide where these go later in the year; we’re going to pick whichever platforms are working really well.’ ”

As Vance explained, a wait-and-see spending model requires brands to frame their definition of success at the start of a campaign, measure how its results compare to that agreed-upon definition and take action if performance falls short of expectations.

 

As we move into 2024, the direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical marketing landscape is undergoing significant transformations. With an evolving regulatory environment and advancing digital platforms, marketers need a forward-thinking strategy to stay ahead. This article will guide you through the forecasted trends and necessary adaptations for your campaigns this year.

Digital Domination in DTC Marketing

The digital realm continues to expand, becoming an ever-more vital component of pharmaceutical marketing strategies. Consumers are increasingly turning to online resources for health information, making digital platforms an essential touchpoint for DTC campaigns. Incorporate interactive and personalized digital experiences to engage your audience effectively.

Empathy-Driven Content

As patients seek more relatable and understanding communication, empathy will be a central theme in content creation. Crafting messages that resonate with the patient’s journey and emotional state can foster a stronger connection and trust between the consumer and the brand.

Regulatory Adaptability

2024 brings with it a wave of regulatory changes impacting DTC pharmaceutical marketing. Staying abreast of these changes and understanding their implications is crucial. Ensure your marketing team is well-informed and agile, ready to adapt strategies as regulations evolve.

Data-Driven Personalization

Utilizing data analytics to personalize marketing efforts will be more critical than ever. Understanding consumer behavior, preferences, and needs allows for more targeted and effective campaigns. Invest in robust data analysis tools and expertise to refine your marketing approach continually.

Collaborative Partnerships

Building partnerships with healthcare providers, tech companies, and patient advocacy groups can amplify your marketing efforts. Collaborative initiatives can provide valuable insights, extend your reach, and enhance credibility. Explore and cultivate strategic partnerships that align with your brand values and goals.

Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Consumers are increasingly aware of and concerned about environmental and social issues. Incorporating sustainable practices and demonstrating social responsibility can significantly impact brand perception and loyalty. Ensure your marketing messages and business practices reflect a commitment to these values.

Telehealth Integration

The rise of telehealth presents new opportunities for DTC pharmaceutical marketing. Integrating your marketing efforts with telehealth platforms can facilitate direct engagement with consumers and provide valuable insights into their preferences and behaviors. Embrace this trend by partnering with telehealth providers and creating seamless digital experiences.

Conclusion

As 2024 unfolds, the direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing industry will continue to evolve, driven by digital innovation, regulatory changes, and consumer expectations. By embracing these trends and preparing for the future, marketers can develop robust strategies that ensure success in this dynamic landscape. Stay informed, be adaptable, and focus on creating genuine connections with your audience to thrive in the world of DTC pharmaceutical marketing.

The point of care has changed dramatically over the past few years, with virtual platforms emerging as a major forum for patient-provider interactions. And that means DTC campaigns need to change, too.

A Phreesia survey of almost 2,000 patients added to evidence that the pandemic has had lasting effects on telehealth usage. More than one-third of survey respondents reported having had a virtual visit with a doctor in the past six months, and 84% of patients said they were at least “somewhat likely” to have a telehealth appointment within the next 12 months.

Those findings suggest that campaigns that focus exclusively on physical doctors’ offices will fail to reach a sufficient audience. Liz Dexter, Vice President for Point of Care at Publicis Health Media, explains how these findings inform strategy.

“We’re always evolving our approach depending on where patients are receiving care,” Dexter says. “It’s really changed a lot in the past three years. As care evolves, we have to evolve. We need to follow trends to make sure we are integrating in appropriate places to reach patients where they are.”

The relocation of many patient-physician encounters from the physical to the virtual realm is leading brand teams to confront new questions. Opportunities to connect with patients through telemedicine platforms still remain limited, Dexter says, but as the technology continues to evolve, it’s important to keep thinking about how to most effectively use it.

And because telemedicine is employed in different ways depending on the care scenario, campaigns need to reflect those differences to achieve best results, Dexter says. That means taking a bespoke approach to each specific use case, something she thinks is especially important.

“Ultimately, we want to empower patients around their telemedicine appointments, providing the right message to the right person at the right time,” Dexter says. “We need to understand how patients and HCPs are actually using telemedicine in specific-use cases, and then provide them with messaging that’s valuable in that moment.”

Phreesia’s survey found that many patients are receptive to receiving resources before, during and after their telehealth appointments. When asked what resources they most wanted, 36% of patients expressed interest in receiving medication information relevant to their condition, as well as guidance on support programs for their health issues (26%) and doctor discussion guides (22%).

The ability to provide patients with such personalized resources as doctor discussion guides makes telehealth platforms highly attractive, but it’s vital that the resources they offer are actually useful to patients.

“We want to provide something of value in this dynamic,” Dexter says. “We don’t just want to have a promotional message wherever we can get one in. We want it to be thoughtful and meaningful, and helpful to both the HCP and patient.”

In that regard, virtual campaigns are much the same as in-office campaigns. The goal is still to motivate patients to discuss their symptoms and treatment options with their physician and empower them to have the conversations that can ultimately improve their health. Telehealth offers new opportunities to do just that, while delivering tailored messaging and achieving measurable outcomes.

Chronic lower respiratory diseases are the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., making them more deadly than conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes.¹ The good news is that there are several medications available to treat this group of illnesses, which include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and improve these individuals’ quality of life. But many patients aren’t having the conversations necessary to make that happen.

COPD patients’ symptoms include cough and shortness of breath.² However, COPD manifests differently from patient to patient and sometimes develops very slowly. The lack of a clear signal that something is wrong means people need prompting to talk to their doctor about their breathing problems.

“Many people don’t even know they have COPD. They experience symptoms that they consider part of normal life progression and essentially learn to live with them,” says Norbert Feigler, MD, Senior Medical Director, Respiratory at AstraZeneca. “Estimates [suggest] as many as half of American COPD patients [are] not yet diagnosed.”

As COPD progresses, daily activities become more difficult, but the process is gradual. An individual may start to walk more slowly or avoid going up steps, incrementally—and often imperceptibly—adapting their lives so that they don’t get out of breath. When their physician asks how they’re doing, they may say they are fine, minimizing their experiences because they have adapted to an undiagnosed illness

That scenario creates an ideal opportunity for direct-to-consumer messaging, particularly at the point of care. If campaigns can help patients recognize that their symptoms and subtle lifestyle changes may be signs of a lung disease, they can encourage conversations between patients and their doctors that may lead to more timely treatment. And, since COPD-related lung damage is permanent, cutting the time to diagnosis can only improve outcomes.

“It can be particularly mentally and emotionally tolling when a patient is first diagnosed, knowing the damage to their lungs is irreversible,” Dr. Feigler says. “This is why it’s important for patients to recognize the signs and symptoms of COPD, driving earlier diagnosis, and ultimately allowing physicians to employ a more proactive approach to disease management.”

Point-of-care campaigns can play a vital role in minimizing that damage, as well as its psychological toll, by encouraging patients to talk to their physician when they first notice possible signs of COPD. Such campaigns can help those who are already diagnosed, too. A Phreesia survey of 1,994 COPD patients found that fewer than half (44%) of diagnosed COPD patients had had detailed discussions with their doctor about their breathing symptoms. In a potentially related finding, 34% of respondents said they lacked a full understanding of their condition.

Those results suggest that COPD patients may be missing out on treatments and lifestyle changes that could improve their quality of life and health outcomes. Albert Rizzo, MD, FACP, Chief Medical Officer at the American Lung Association, explains how educational campaigns can benefit COPD patients.

“One of the best things to help a COPD patient is to educate them about the importance of staying active” Dr. Rizzo says. “You don’t have to do 30 minutes on a treadmill every day, but walking to the mailbox, doing the steps once or twice a day, just trying to maintain a level of activity, can go a long way in helping them feel like they have better control in their day-to-day activities.”

An estimated 12.2 million Americans have been diagnosed with COPD, but even more are living with the disease without a diagnosis. Those numbers indicate that DTC campaigns that change the awareness and behaviors of even a fraction of those suffering with COPD can have a huge impact and address a great unmet need by encouraging patients and providers to work together to identify symptoms, diagnose COPD earlier and ultimately shift the standard of care to a proactive approach to disease management.

References

1. “Leading Causes of Death,” National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Jan. 18, 2023.
2. Lee, Y.-C., Chang, K.-Y. & Sethi, S. Association of Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease With County Health Disparities in New York State. JAMA Netw Open.2021;4(11):e2134268. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.34268

For decades, traditional or linear TV has dominated the budgets of pharma advertisers. To meet industry recommendations developed decades ago, which call for audience sizes to be at least 10% of the targetable population, life sciences companies have turned to TV where it’s possible to reach millions at scale.

However, something interesting happened in 2022: Pharma brands decreased their linear TV ad spend for the first time. Last year, linear TV represented 43% of the industry’s media mix, according to Standard Media Index data. Brands have increasingly reallocated those ad dollars toward digital channels, particularly connected TV (CTV).

 

CTV had been steadily growing for years, its popularity only accelerated by the pandemic. By June 2022, the Leichtman Research Group found that 87% of U.S. households have at least one CTV device, which includes smart TVs, streaming devices like the Fire TV Stick, and game consoles. Beyond its popularity, CTV works.

 

Unlike linear TV, where advertisers have to cast a wide net to reach their patient audiences, CTV offers data-driven programmatic targeting. This empowers pharma advertisers to create campaign-specific patient audiences based on robust, anonymized healthcare and behavioral data, as well as demographics. From there, they can optimize live campaigns while gleaning actionable insights from faster, superior measurement.

 

The shift from linear TV to CTV is not just a trend, but rather the mark of a new brand battlefield for pharma advertisers. Here are three things to consider as you make the switch.

 

 

1. CTV Can Engage the Most Relevant Patient Audiences

 

CTV’s superior data-driven targeting capabilities are now enabling pharma advertisers to reach specific patient populations with a level of privacy-safe HIPAA-compliant precision that was impossible until just a few years ago. Consider that, historically speaking, media buyers have always had to cast a wide net based on program demographics when planning TV campaigns – no matter how small the target audience they wanted to reach. In addition, planning decisions were mostly made based on one or two variables, such as a show’s target age or gender, versus the four or more variables that programmatic CTV affords.

 

Today, it’s possible to reach specific patient populations in a privacy-safe way with the use of machine learning technology, which can pore over real-world clinical data to determine correlations between demographics and disease to create campaign-specific modeled audiences. Machine learning algorithms can even find audience-specific correlations down to a single show or program and automatically optimize campaigns based on real-world outcomes.

One pharmaceutical company and its agency of record ran a multichannel campaign with DeepIntent to raise awareness for a plaque psoriasis medication. DeepIntent’s machine learning algorithms automatically optimized the campaign in-flight, maximizing media efficiencies. The brand was able to increase verified patient reach by 5.7X while decreasing the cost-per-verified patient by 83%.

 

2. CTV Can Improve the Incremental Reach of Linear TV Campaigns

 

For many pharma brands, linear TV remains an effective avenue for reaching consumers. But with the number of “cord-cutters” on the rise and the rapid adoption of streaming content viewing –- which has only accelerated during the pandemic – advertisers are rethinking strategies that rely solely on linear TV.

 

Notably, they’re realizing they can reach new, unique audiences that their traditional campaigns will miss. One lung cancer drug reached 288,000 verified patients with linear TV. Working with DeepIntent, the brand used CTV to extend reach to 37,000 incremental patients, with a mere 4% audience overlap.

 

 

This level of visibility into incremental audiences is made possible thanks in large part to automated content recognition (ACR) data, which allows advertisers to understand exactly who is watching what and when. By leveraging ACR data to plan their CTV campaigns, advertisers can ensure that they’re finding new audiences – and not simply reaching existing viewers. Considering that many marketers say their ability to manage reach and frequency across CTV and digital channels is a top concern, integrating ACR data offers a novel approach to this challenge.

 

3. CTV Can Supercharge Other Channels

 

Linear TV isn’t an outlier. CTV also has the ability to supercharge other digital channels. For pharma advertisers looking to drive audience quality and script lift, CTV as a standalone channel consistently outperforms online video and display media, for example.

 

However, time and time again, DeepIntent clients have found the best results from digital channels working together in tandem.

One top pharmaceutical company invests heavily in addressable media to support its largest brand, an antiviral medication used to treat symptoms of an infectious disease. Collaborating with DeepIntent on a multichannel campaign, the company’s agency of record found that CTV delivered 2X higher new-to-brand (NBRx) prescriptions than online video and 2.5X higher NBRx than display media. Combined exposure to both CTV and online video drove 4X higher NBRx than display media alone. When all three channels were combined, NBRx was 6X higher than display and 4X higher than online video.

 

 

Switching From Linear TV to CTV Represents the Future of Pharma Advertising

 

Linear TV may have dominated healthcare marketing in the past, but that’s starting to change. Patients are increasingly embracing new forms of media, and it’s time for the pharma industry to catch up or risk getting left behind.

 

Many leading pharma brands have already recognized this landscape shift and begun trialing CTV as a larger portion of their ad budgets. The result is that they’re generally improving the ROI of their campaigns while becoming much more targeted in their approach. At a higher level, this shift further points to a new era for pharma advertising that’s data-driven and meets patients where they are, in a much more efficient way than previously thought possible.

Clearly understanding their diagnosis and treatment plan is vital for cancer patients in order for them to have an optimal treatment experience. In fact, studies have linked patient education to reduced depression and side effects from cancer therapies. Yet new data shows there are critical gaps in cancer patients’ knowledge about their condition and treatment.

Results from 825 patients diagnosed with or treated for cancer who were surveyed on Phreesia’s PatientInsights platform as they checked in for their doctors’ appointments revealed the breadth of that knowledge gap: More than one-third (34%) of surveyed patients were unaware of how advanced their cancer was.

That’s a percentage that Justin Holko, Vice President and head of the Global Oncology/Hematology Commercial Business Unit at Regeneron, finds troubling. Shubh Goel, Vice President and U.S. franchise head for Immuno-oncology and Gastrointestinal Tumors at AstraZeneca, shares his concerns, calling the statistic “a challenge for our industry to do better.”

Other survey findings further reinforced the conclusion that too many cancer patients are in the dark about important aspects of their condition and treatment. More than one-third (34%) of survey respondents said they lacked a clear understanding of their cancer therapy before starting treatment, while 17% understood their treatment “somewhat,” and a further 17% had little to no understanding of their treatment.

Similarly, only 35% of patients said they had undergone genetic or biomarker testing for their cancer, and 24% were unsure whether or not they had received such testing. The remaining 41% of surveyed patients did not undergo genetic or biomarker testing, depriving them and their physicians of insights that could have informed their care.

Holko sees those findings as evidence of the need for medical, commercial and research and development teams to make sure that every patient, caregiver, nurse and doctor has the opportunity to learn about all of the options available to them. But providing that education, particularly to patients, requires thoughtfulness: When communicating with patients at vulnerable points in their cancer journey, how information is conveyed is just as important as the knowledge itself.

“It's not just your delivery of the education and facts, but doing it in a way that is uncomplicated, easy to understand, not overwhelming and that makes people feel like they’re equipped with the tools they need to go talk to their doctor or better understand their condition,” Holko explains. “It has to be done in a very personal way.”

Cancer-therapy drugmakers also play an important role in helping patients understand their diagnosis and treatment pathways. “Because we develop and make these cancer treatments, we have the opportunity to be an ally and an educator,” Goel says, highlighting the need “to work hand-in-hand with advocacy partners to advance dialogue with patients and grow our education efforts.”

Additional survey results indicated avenues for activating patients and improving their understanding of their cancer and available therapies. A majority (69%) of surveyed patients said they had sought resources beyond their healthcare provider to learn more about their illness. Online searches (48%), general cancer websites (36%) and specific cancer websites (32%) were cited as the most widely accessed resources.

Meeting patients where they are can better address their knowledge gaps and ultimately improve their cancer treatment, Holko says, pointing to the need for market research that can shed more light on how different patients find and absorb cancer information.

“It really comes down to understanding who your patients are and using every channel available to you to reach the right patient at the right time in a very personalized way,” he says.