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In an era focused on changing consumer behavior and technological advancements, it’s no surprise marketers have had to adjust their approach when it comes to advertising. This is especially true for pharmaceutical marketers, as they aim to reach engaged patient audiences with important messages related to their health and well-being as privacy laws become more stringent and consumers become increasingly discerning about their health choices. And while these shifts have generally propelled the industry forward, one critical facet of marketing has remained stagnant — media planning. It’s still annual and static.
Scott Knoll
The ecosystem is evolving too quickly for planning to solely be annual. As media has modernized, data is available to chain drug store and retail pharmacy marketers on a more regular basis, and it is imperative to analyze and utilize these insights to plan more fruitfully and better optimize spend.
How the annual planning process began
It’s worth reminding us all where we started. At the dawn of media buying for pharma marketers, the process was a much less fluid concept dictated by traditional TV, providing a limited amount of feedback data and on a significantly delayed basis.
Once advertising budgets were finalized, planners allocated dollars into big media channel-based buckets with lids given the limitations on performance data, resulting in a highly siloed and inefficient system with less collaboration capabilities between planners, agencies, vendors and partners. But pharma marketers are no longer stuck doing this, because today’s marketing media mix is much more diverse than it was in the past.
Why it’s not living up to the state of the industry
In order to align with viewership and engagement trends, pharma dollars have followed consumers in their shift from cable TV to connected TV (CTV). While a heavy investment in linear TV served pharmaceutical and chain drug marketers for a long time, they can now reach consumers through different digital and traditional channels and formats, allowing for better targeting as well as more creativity and eyeballs. Further, the digitization of channels has allowed for more regularly available performance data. As a result, we’re seeing pharma marketers evolve their media investment strategies — spending more in newer environments like over-the-top (OTT), short-form video and podcasts.
To that end, we’ve seen massive transformation and innovation when it comes to measurement and performance data for across TV (and other digital advertising channels) as marketers seek to prove the impact of their investments in this growing environment — resulting in the ability to understand the impact of advertising and optimize results. But with these efforts across both traditional and digital metrics inevitably comes fragmentation — leading to optimization efforts that occur in silos, and less effective planning and buying.
The annual media plans of the past are no longer sustainable across today’s media landscape — and this is especially critical for pharma marketers who need to get out their developments in vaccines, cancer treatments and GLP-1 drugs as quickly and effectively as possible to stay competitive. Media plans need to become a more fluid source of truth, allowing pharma marketers to restrategize and get ahead of their competitors.
What needs to happen to
get it there?
As demonstrated by CO-
VID-19’s impact, constant and continuous assessment and reallocation are more important than ever. Especially as pharma and chain drug marketers invest more in their advertising — our data shows that pharma ad spend was up 12% year over year in February — they must evolve the annual plan rooted in technology with the flexibility to pivot. This will not only allow pharma marketers to plan in real time, but with machine learning they will have the capability to plan more accurately through forecasting, further advancing media planning abilities.
According to McKinsey, the estimated consumer spend on wellness products and services is more than $450 billion in the United States, rising at more than 5% annually. As a result, we’re seeing pharma and chain drug marketers spend more on ads to reach these health-focused consumers, but this increased investment makes it even more important to ensure the drug and pharma companies’ spend is effective and they are seeing a return. While marketers for these categories must be proactive about this shift in order to incite change, advertising technology partners must realize these inefficiencies and create seamless solutions to support their clients now and in the future, given exciting advancements on the horizon.
Scott Knoll is founder and chief executive officer of Guideline.
