LAS VEGAS — Pharmaceutical advertising has been the backbone of TV ad strategies since the inception of the medium. But maintaining that central role requires embracing new delivery platforms including YouTube and connected TV as consumer viewing behavior shifts.
“It’s about staying the backbone [of TV],” Kurt Robinson, evp, business development at Swoop, told Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at CES. “ With the shifts in consumer behavior, the question now is how will pharma marketers embrace the new mechanisms of delivery for TV? The new platforms and channels, YouTube, connected TV, all the new ways and places that people are consuming TV content, how will those be incorporated into a cohesive strategy?”
In Robinson’s view, pharma brands should scale video because the format effectively tells stories that educate patients and progress them toward treatment.
Top-of-funnel education at scale
Television serves as an upper-funnel resource capable of reaching large audiences with creative running 60-to-90 seconds. By going beyond the traditional 30-second spot, marketers can explain complex drug messaging and patient impact information, Robinson noted.
“You can reach a lot of people at scale and you can use creative that is sometimes 1-minute 90-seconds long to convey what is sometimes the complex message about that drug and how it can impact patients’ lives,” Robinson said.
This baseline understanding enables productive physician conversations as patients move down the treatment path.
Centralized data cuts fragmentation
While channels remain disparate, centralized data and custom audiences provide consistency across activation strategies and inform both upfront planning investment decisions and downstream real-time deployment.
“The channels are disparate, the data is centralized,” Robinson said. “I think of the data and custom audiences as the way to really cut through that fragmentation, bring consistency to who and how you’re activating across various channels, and then also pull that data forward.”
Video format drives education
Pharmaceutical marketers aspire to educate and inform patients, making video and television ideal mediums for delivering information needed to progress toward treatment decisions.
“It’s a great format and canvas to tell a story,” Robinson said. “That’s really what marketers are aspiring to do is to educate, inform, and get people the information that they need to progress towards treatment and video and TV is a great medium for doing that.”
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.
