CANNES – The promise of AI-powered creative versioning and real-time optimization in healthcare marketing faces a fundamental obstacle: regulatory review processes that haven’t evolved to match the technology’s capabilities.
“The promise and the possibility with AI won’t be fully realized if the industry doesn’t change and evolve around it,” Andrea Palmer, CEO of Publicis Health Media, said during a Beet.TV Leadership Sessions panel moderated by Next In Media’s Mike Shields at Cannes Lions. “It can do it. It’s just we’re not going to be able to execute it as we’d like to.”
The panel, which included executives from The Trade Desk, Swoop, and Genentech, explored how advanced TV and AI are transforming healthcare marketing—and where institutional barriers still slow progress.
Beyond the silos
Healthcare marketing has traditionally separated linear TV investments from digital, but that’s changing rapidly. Marc Minassian, head of Media & Innovation at Genentech, noted that several brands have reallocated investment from linear to advanced TV and are seeing positive results.
“They are seeing branded search volume go up even at lower levels of investment,” Minassian said. The key selling point: driving the same awareness for less money or increased awareness for the same investment.
Katie Carr, CRO at Swoop, emphasized the importance of using consistent audiences across channels. “From a risk perspective, I’m not going to get into privacy, but healthcare is a highly regulated space, and the more data or more partners that you introduce, the more risk you create for the brand,” she explained.
Real-time optimization arrives
Lindsay Reardon, senior director for Business Development at The Trade Desk, highlighted how independent DSPs enable real-time adjustments across all digital channels. This agility is particularly valuable in pharma, where audience quality serves as a leading indicator.
“You don’t necessarily have to wait for the script lift,” Reardon said, referring to the ways health care marketers measure the increase in prescription volume for a particular drug. “There are more quick to market metrics that you’re able to use—audience quality, cost per in-target reach—that will have a correlation with what you will ultimately see when your script lift readout comes.”
The Trade Desk uses AI to analyze millions of signals in milliseconds, determining which impressions are most likely to drive outcomes. “That’s just something that a human can’t do,” Reardon noted.
Metrics beyond the prescription
Palmer challenged the industry’s focus on script lift as the ultimate metric. “There’s so much more than the final script lift metric,” she said. “The role of marketing is far more than driving scripts. It’s education, it’s comfort, it’s confidence, it’s conversation.”
She advocated for looking at performance throughout the funnel: Are campaigns driving people to join patient communities? Are they encouraging people to seek treatment options? These behavioral signals provide more actionable insights than waiting for prescription data.
AI’s expanding role
AI is already helping healthcare marketers reach beyond their core audiences. Minassian shared how AI identifies additional people who would care about a brand’s message — like adult children of aging parents who might need certain treatments.
“What AI is now doing is say, ‘Hey, expand beyond that. We have a high probability or a likelihood that this person is going to convert on this ad,’” he added.
Katie Carr described how AI helps make sense of the data influx. “The most challenging thing for marketers today in every vertical is getting the data so that it’s digestible and actionable,” she said. AI enables understanding of which messages resonate, what copy works, and which images connect with specific audiences.
The regulatory reality check
Despite technological capabilities, healthcare’s regulatory framework remains a bottleneck. Creative versioning powered by AI still must go through med-legal review, version control, and regulatory approval processes.
But there’s hope.
Minassian noted that legal and compliance partners at Genentech show genuine interest in understanding how modern media works. “They do have an interest and a curiosity to understand it at a deeper level, which kind of erodes some of that protective nature or risk aversion that you often see in the category.”
The coming split
Carr predicted major changes in patient and provider engagement over the next five years. “The modern day website has had very little innovation in sophistication,” she said, envisioning “a human-like experience” that collects data and fuels marketing decisions.
Reardon expects a split in the industry. “There are going to be some leaders in the pharma space that are really driving it forward,” she said. “And I think there’s going to be some that are a lot more cautious and take a lot longer to get there.”
When asked if the industry would achieve smooth creative versioning within a year, Palmer expressed optimism about manufacturer interest. “They get it, they get that that’s the possibility. And it’s retraining an institutional values and knowledge base within all of the different teams.”
For healthcare marketing to fully embrace AI’s potential, the entire ecosystem — from creative teams to legal departments—must evolve together. As Minassian put it, “You need to have those folks that are helping you stay compliant understand technology in order to give you the best guidance possible.”
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