Television advertising for pharmaceutical brands has evolved beyond general demographic targeting to enable condition-specific audience layering that eliminates wasted impressions while maintaining the mass reach needed for awareness campaigns.
“Where we used to do a broad kind of demo targeting, now we can bring in these condition-based audiences that allow us to become more precise,” Katie Van Horn, associate director for Patient Marketing at Takeda, told Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein. “Now, you don’t have to just do age, gender. We can layer on these specific conditions so we can become more precise and reach those audiences and not waste those impressions.”
This precision targeting maintains television’s upper-funnel awareness role while addressing pharmaceutical marketing’s need to reach qualified patients efficiently within highly regulated environments.
Privacy-first partnerships
Takeda places a premium on data partners who meet both company privacy standards and patient-first principles, ensuring condition-specific targeting respects consumer privacy while delivering relevant health content.
“There are partners out there that are meeting the needs of both what our company wants to do, which is putting patients first and respecting their privacy as well as doing what’s right, which is meeting the needs of serving them with content that is the right content for them,” Van Horn said.
This approach prevents serving irrelevant health content to consumers while maintaining compliance with pharmaceutical industry regulations and internal governance standards.
Programmatic flexibility
Programmatic buying provides agility that linear television and other traditional channels cannot match, allowing pharmaceutical marketers to test, learn, and optimize campaigns based on performance signals.
“Unlike in linear TV, we don’t always have the ability to move our dollars around,” Van Horn said. “Programmatic allows us to move those dollars, test and learn, see what’s working, and then make those changes.”
This nimbleness matters particularly in regulated healthcare environments where proving return on investment requires demonstrable health outcomes rather than just exposure metrics.
Health outcomes over vanity
Programmatic infrastructure enables measurement of meaningful health indicators like doctor visits rather than relying solely on traditional media metrics like impressions or engagement rates.
“There are exciting things that are new that you can measure now, like doctor visits,” Van Horn said. “It was more health outcome-based, measurable aspects that we can now look at in the programmatic world that we couldn’t before.”
These outcome-based measurements address pharmaceutical marketing’s need to demonstrate business impact in highly regulated environments where budget justification requires proof of patient engagement beyond awareness.
Quality over volume
For Takeda, audience quality metrics take precedence over reach volume, focusing spending on the most qualified patients rather than maximizing impression counts.
“Audience quality is incredibly important to us. We want to make sure that our dollars, when we put them out into programmatic, into our digital ecosystem, that they’re going to reach the most qualified patient,” Van Horn said. “We balance that also with ensuring that those dollars are a cost per qualified audience.”
“Programmatic allows us to reach those audiences at the right time in their journey and move them down the funnel,” Van Horn added. “In a very regulated environment where your dollars are very stringent, you want to have very health outcome-based measurements, and programmatic allows you to have that as well.”
You’re watching “Omnichannel Starts with TV: The Evolving Role of TV in Healthcare Marketing”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Swoop. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
