NEW YORK — The pressures on media buying, from consumer privacy restrictions to finding the right place and time for the right message, have never been simple to manage. But to get a truly acute sense of the depth of complexity and opportunity buyers grapple with daily, just look to healthcare marketing, said McLean Shaw, Sr. Director, Head of Product & Design at IQVIA’ Digital.
“The biggest challenge in media buying today is navigating the complex regulatory landscape, understanding privacy, and also marrying that with the complex nature of advertising technology in general,” Shaw told Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein. “We’re dealing with two of the most complex and technical subject matter areas in all of professional work.”
This convergence requires healthcare marketers to master both medical data intricacies and programmatic advertising mechanics while ensuring compliance with an evolving regulatory framework that now spans 19 different state laws governing healthcare marketing data use.
Building compliance into the foundation
Unlike other industries where privacy compliance can be addressed through policy overlays, healthcare advertising requires fundamental platform architecture designed around regulatory requirements. Shaw noted that IQVIA, which bills itself as an omnichannel platform for healthcare marketing and analytics, deals with this challenge by integrating compliance considerations at every level of their media operating system.
“Healthcare is one of the most regulated spaces that exists, and in advertising technology, we have to be very careful about privacy, risk of re-identification and other things that aren’t as much of a concern in other spaces,” Shaw said.
The regulatory landscape continues expanding, with laws like Washington State’s comprehensive privacy law, the My Health, My Data Act, which represents a new category of healthcare-specific marketing restrictions. These regulations go beyond general privacy laws to address the unique sensitivities around medical information and patient targeting.
“We have to be nimble and continuously evolve with the changing legal landscape to help build in compliance to these regulations at the foundation of our advertising technology platform,” Shaw noted. This approach contrasts with cross-industry platforms that attempt to serve healthcare as one vertical among many.
Vertical technology advantages
IQVIA’s strategy centers on purpose-built healthcare advertising infrastructure rather than adapting general-purpose marketing tools. Shaw argues that healthcare’s unique data requirements and compliance needs make specialized platforms essential for effective marketing.
“When you have a cross-industry product, it’s very hard to super serve the needs of each individual vertical that uses it,” he said. The company’s media operating system integrates multiple healthcare data sources including claims data, behavioral data, lab data, and population health information.
Each phase of campaign development, from planning through activation to measurement, incorporates both rich healthcare datasets and compliance expertise. “We have teams of experts that basically help us put the right guardrails in place at each step of the way to make sure that the healthcare marketer is both effective and compliant,” Shaw said.
FreeWheel integration expands reach
The partnership with FreeWheel DSP brings programmatic buying capabilities directly into IQVIA’s healthcare-focused interface, allowing marketers to manage campaigns without switching between platforms. This integration uses FreeWheel’s bid-as-a-service technology to enable native buying experiences within the media operating system.
“Healthcare marketers can set up, manage, and optimize programmatic campaigns right within our UI,” Shaw said. The FreeWheel Identity Network extends campaign reach across channels, devices, and media types while maintaining the healthcare-specific compliance requirements that general programmatic platforms struggle to address.
This approach recognizes that healthcare marketers need to reach both healthcare providers and consumers across multiple touchpoints while maintaining strict data governance throughout the process.
AI agents managing healthcare campaigns
Shaw is also thinking about the particulars of how artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how healthcare advertising campaigns get planned, executed, and optimized. Rather than manual campaign management, AI agents could handle complex optimization tasks while healthcare marketers focus on strategic oversight.
“Does this paradigm shift to where agents are actively managing and optimizing campaigns for you and you turn into more of a manager of agents as opposed to a trader who is manually turning knobs on the campaign?” Shaw asked.
The AI capabilities extend beyond campaign optimization into measurement that connects advertising exposure to real-world health outcomes. IQVIA’s healthcare datasets enable marketers to measure success beyond traditional metrics like click-through rates.
“We’re enabling healthcare marketers to not just understand some of the traditional ad tech metrics like cost per click or click through rate, but really tying it to real world outcomes like are these medications actually working or are we driving patient adherence,” Shaw explained.
Real-world outcomes
IQVIA’s focus on connecting ad campaigns to actual health outcomes represents a major evolution in marketing accountability. Shaw suggested this measurement capability could transform how healthcare marketers evaluate campaign effectiveness and justify advertising investments.
“Really understanding how this pulls through to patient lives and how it improves healthcare for all,” Shaw said, provides a measurement framework that extends far beyond traditional marketing metrics, potentially offering healthcare marketers the clearest return-on-investment calculations available in any advertising vertical.
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