MIAMI — For years, pharmaceutical advertisers watched from the sidelines as other industries rushed into connected television. The hesitation was understandable: older patient populations still glued to linear TV, murky measurement capabilities, and the ever-present specter of healthcare privacy regulations made CTV feel like a gamble rather than an opportunity.
But that calculus may be shifting. As measurement tools mature and publishers become more willing participants in the addressable ecosystem, pharma brands are discovering they can definitively connect ad exposures to prescription outcomes – something that could unlock CTV budgets across the industry.
“You don’t get better data, you don’t get better targeting, you don’t get better strategies without measurement being there to be able to speak to it, be able to prove it,” said Faryn Brown, VP of addressable at KINESSO, in this video interview with Beet.TV at POSSIBLE 2026.
Why pharma dragged its feet on streaming
The pharmaceutical industry’s cautious approach to CTV wasn’t simply resistance to change. Brown pointed to structural factors that kept linear television in the media mix longer than other categories.
“A lot of the therapeutic areas do have a patient population that is a bit older, a little bit less likely to be cord cutters, and so slower adoption there,” she said. “So there is still a need for linear TV.”
Until recently, advertisers couldn’t draw a clean line between streaming ad exposure and downstream behavior – say, a patient filling a prescription or a healthcare professional changing their prescribing habits. That uncertainty made it difficult to justify shifting budgets away from the known quantity of broadcast television, even as audiences fragmented across streaming platforms.
Clean rooms become the compliance cornerstone
Threading the needle between personalization and privacy requires pharmaceutical advertisers to build their audience strategies on solid regulatory ground from the start. Brown emphasized that compliant audience segments must be constructed before they ever reach demand-side platforms for activation.
“Working with partners like Acxiom to make sure that we’re building these safe and compliant audience segments so that we are then able to reach the right patients and the right HCPs with that personalized message in a safe and compliant way,” she explained.
The identity challenge remains thornier on the direct-to-consumer side than for healthcare professional targeting, where the Medical Professional Identifier provides a clearer path. Brown acknowledged there’s no single identifier that solves the problem entirely. Instead, KINESSO focuses on helping clients build their own first-party data assets – encouraging patients and HCPs to opt into information through advocacy groups, support programs, and other value exchanges that create sustainable, privacy-compliant audience foundations.
Rare disease demands premium placement
Kinesso offers platforms and tools to optimize the marketing lifecycle, from planning and strategy to activation and measurement.
Brown pushed back against the notion that rare disease brands should avoid streaming environments simply because their target audience might number in the thousands.
“Something like rare disease, for example, when you might have a patient population of 8,000 people, that doesn’t mean that they’re not on CTV,” she said. “For something like rare disease, it’s even more important that we’re reaching them in these premium environments.”
The context matters as much as the reach. When a rare disease patient encounters a brand message while watching programming they value highly, they’re more likely to hold that advertiser in similar regard. Broader therapeutic categories like diabetes can afford a different approach – CTV becomes one touchpoint in a longer journey rather than a singular moment of connection.
