ANNUAL REPORT
2026 Health Marketing and
Media Trends Report
Introduction
Across the industry, several trends are converging to redefine what effective healthcare marketing looks like in 2026. DTC strategies are expanding into more direct patient engagement, shaped by personalization, intent-driven targeting, and real-time optimization. Omnichannel planning is becoming less about simply being present across platforms and more about orchestrating a coherent story across touchpoints, including moments that influence the HCP–DTC conversation. Interoperability and measurement are moving to the center of strategy as marketers demand faster insight, more accountable spend, and clearer visibility into what is actually driving outcomes. And of course, AI is everywhere!
In fact, with AI, the market is getting noisier. New tools and new vendors are promising faster activation, better targeting, and smarter optimization. But not all solutions are built for the nuances of healthcare. In 2026, the competitive advantage will come from those with disciplined approaches to execution and planning. This includes asking sharper questions before just building solutions that can be built quickly, as well as validating claims, and investing in capabilities that can prove impact and scale in the real world, under real regulatory and operational constraints.
This 2026 Healthcare Marketing Trends Report explores the most important trends shaping pharma marketing in 2026, from media and creative shifts to data strategy, cross-channel orchestration, and the evolution of agentic workflows. Its purpose is not just to predict what’s next but to help healthcare marketers make confident decisions in a year where the ground beneath us is shifting.
To uncover these trends and insights, PulsePoint interviewed the innovators shaping strategy at industry-leading marketing firms, CMI Media Group and PulsePoint.
Topics Covered
2026 Bold Predictions
- Here are some bold, blue-sky predictions about where the pharma industry is heading next year, according to our experts.
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Data Interoperability
- In 2026, transparency and interoperability are the key words that should be top of mind in relation to data.
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Agentic Workflows
- 2026 is the year to unleash AI and machine learning. But it won’t be all magic and miracles.
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HCP–DTC Omnichannel Orchestration
- Reaching the HCP and consumers in silos simply isn’t good enough anymore.
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DTC Optimization
- DTC optimization is entering a new phase: performance matters more, and tolerance for waste is shrinking.
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About CMI & PulsePoint
- CMI Media Group is a global, full-service media agency and PulsePoint is a leading healthcare marketing platform.
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2026 Bold Predictions
Here are some bold, blue-sky predictions about where the pharma industry is heading next year, according to our experts.
AI advancement enables marketers to get more predictive
“In 2026 we'll start to see better AI models come out that allow us to use predictive analysis a lot more effectively and efficiently. Being more predictive ultimately leads marketers to deliver more conversions and more engagement earlier on within campaigns. Strategy supported by this kind of data will help improve the way users interact with tech and brand messaging leading to more trust and better outcomes.”
Andrew Miller
Executive Vice President, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
This isn’t the end of agencies
“We're going to hear more questions about the role of agencies; that anyone can create a campaign brief and execute an entire campaign with agentic end-to-end workflows. But the reality is that data legislation as well as creative, platform, and inventory constraints requires in-depth expertise and human oversight, especially in the healthcare space. Pharma marketing needs that human intervention long term and I think that’s what’s missing from those conversations.”
Clifton Covey
Senior Vice President, Group Director, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
New environments will emerge
“The emergence of new environments will be utilized to engage HCP and consumer audiences in programmatic, including YouTube and Google Search.”
Keith Matt
Group Vice President, Sales, PulsePoint
AI visibility will be just as important as search visibility
“As LLMs increasingly crawl brand websites, organic social, and community platforms like Reddit, we will need to treat AI-driven discovery as a new channel of its own. Paid alone may not be enough anymore and brands will need an intentional organic content strategy that feeds the AI ecosystem so that when people ask health-related questions on AI platforms, the answers reflect our most accurate, up-to-date and compliant information. This means tighter integration between paid, organic, social, SEO, and GEO, and even community engagement.”
Callie DiZillo
Vice President, Paid Social, CMI Media Group
Influencer content and personalized offerings will dominate social
“I think influencer strategies will dominate on the awareness side in 2026, but I also think we're going to get a lot more conversion-focused video creative. I even think static content with highly personalized offerings will dominate social.”
Josh Simon
Group Senior Vice President, Centered, CMI Media Group
Quality becomes the competitive moat
“In a world where everyone can build fast with AI, the competitive advantage belongs to those who build right. The winners in 2026 won't be the ones who shipped the fastest. They'll be the ones who shipped right, who maintained intellectual rigor even when the technology made it easy to skip it, who demanded accountability from their vendors, and who refused to confuse motion with progress. In a market flooded with AI slop, quality becomes the competitive moat.”
Ezra Suveyke
Chief Product Officer, PulsePoint
Opaque supplier models won’t survive
“I think we're definitely going to continue seeing a significant push for transparency within the supplier ecosystem. It's about truly understanding the various tiers of the supply chain and exactly where the dollars are flowing. For too long, that's been a really murky area, and I believe that particular piece of the puzzle is now facing considerable scrutiny.”
Molly Farrell
Senior Vice President, Programmatic, CMI Media Group
Experiential activations will become a bigger force
“Over the last several years we have seen a shift toward virtual/online experiences. We are going to see a swing back that links online opportunities to bigger and better in-person experiences that complement and tell a story. We’ll see in-person engagement directly with the brand, influencer, thought leader, etc. that is tied to sporting events, concerts, and more, all while linking consumers back to their digital journey when they get home. The key is making memorable opportunities at every step of their consumer journeys."
Julie Hurvitz Aliaga
Executive Vice President of Innovation, Content and Partnerships, CMI Media Group
As the noise rises in 2026, skepticism will win
“It is going to be an unusually noisy year, where providers will be making more claims and launching more new products, driven by infusion of AI into capabilities and, more broadly, a changed competitive landscape. In this context, the most important thing for marketers and agencies is to ask very thoughtful and sometimes uncomfortably pointed questions. A solution presented as providing HCP–DTC alignment should be met with questions specifically on how consumer signals inform HCP delivery (and vice versa). A claim of a high match rate should be met with an ask for data on 24-hour and 7-day realized reach by specialty. The presentation of a DTC campaign optimization capability should be questioned in terms of the frequency of measurement feedback and the health-specific variables used to optimize. 2026 is a year to challenge more and accept less at face; the stronger providers will have immediate and specific answers, backed by data.”
Parker Noren
Senior Vice President, Growth and Strategy, PulsePoint, Medscape, and WebMD
AI Implementation
Spotlight
PulsePoint and CMI leaders describe the year ahead as one marked with the potential for advanced transformation, but it is imperative that organizations and solutions can prove real, measurable efficiency gains from AI. That pressure is not just being felt by marketers but across the entire life sciences ecosystem.
This view is reinforced in the 2026 Life Sciences Outlook from the Deloitte US Center for Health Solutions. In the report, leaders note that organizations feel a strong conviction that AI will be strategy-shaping, but few have successfully implemented it to date. In fact:
0
%
of life sciences executives say AI will drastically impact strategy in the year ahead.
0
%
report they’ve successfully scaled AI so far.
0
%
say they’ve achieved significant returns on AI investments.
What it signals:
AI is widely viewed as essential, but most organizations are still in the early stages of scaling, and few have unlocked meaningful ROI. The next wave of advantage will likely come from moving beyond experimentation into operationalized, compliant AI programs with measurable impact.
Other Trends Influencing Strategy Shifts at Life Sciences Companies
■ Regulatory and policy changes
■ AI and emerging technologies
■ Pricing and access pressures
■ Evolving customer needs
■ Heightened economic uncertainty
Data Transparency & Interoperability
In 2026, transparency and interoperability are the key words that should be top of mind in relation to data.
Barriers to interoperability are falling faster than ever
“There’s opportunities to increase the transparency in which we analyze data. With advances in LLMs, we can feed far more data into the system and get clearer, faster insight into results, planning, and strategic priorities. At the same time, interoperability is accelerating—not just in theory, but in practice. We’ve talked for years about clean rooms and connected data workflows, but the barriers are finally coming down as AI initiatives make compliant linking and sharing of data assets much more achievable. When transparency and interoperability both increase, it gets to this flywheel effect: Better insight enables better connectivity, which unlocks even better insight. The next magic trick is what comes after that—taking action. And we’re already seeing early indications of what’s possible, like creating shared identity frameworks that let customers orchestrate with their own identity graphs at a more granular level across a unified data layer.”
Jonathan Zile
Senior Vice President of Data Solutions, PulsePoint and Internet Brands
Interoperability hasn’t happened yet, but there are opportunities
“There's been this gap in the volume of data that we've been getting, whether that's from suppliers, marketers, campaign engagement, and/or website traffic. Currently it’s living in so many different places. I think as a whole there's an opportunity for us to figure out a more synthesized way to collect all of this disparate data and share it. As the year progresses, what I hope to see is a way for us to take all that fragmented cross-channel data that comes in, and build out our optimizations to be faster and more meaningful.”
Bari Maniff
Group Senior Vice President, Engagement Strategy, CMI Media Group
We need integration tools that don’t require a full engineering project
“The biggest data unlock would be connecting customer behavior data, media performance, and first-party or CRM insights into one view. That’s what helps us understand what’s really driving engagement and where we’re losing people. The hurdles are mostly technical and organizational. Systems don’t line up, and ownership is split. We need alignment on standards, clear roles, and integration tools that don’t require a full engineering project every time.”
Mark Pappas
Executive Vice President of Innovation, CMI Media Group
Trusted data signals matter more than HCP identity
“Attention is getting harder to capture in a ChatGPT-enabled world. The way people research, discover, and engage with content, including ads, is fundamentally changing. That’s why having a grounding in real data signals, not just identity alone, is becoming more important than ever. We’re also seeing a big increase in companies claiming they have NPIs in their data graph. But connecting a few HCP records to a digital graph is the easy part—what’s truly hard is proving accuracy and building an identity spine with the velocity and quality required for NPI targeting at scale. Very few players have meaningful first-party, logged-in NPI signals. That’s the core of our HCP spine, and it’s something we’ve spent the last five years building with disciplined methodology.”
Jonathan Zile
Senior Vice President of Data Solutions, PulsePoint and Internet Brands
Simple strategic approaches Prevent headaches later
“One of the biggest things to be mindful of with data accessibility and interoperability is having consistent naming conventions across channels so the data that's being pulled in is consistent and clean to ensure it goes into dashboards properly. We're going through a large taxonomy change with one of our clients right now to ensure all media is leveraging the same naming convention for that purpose—to automate reporting into a unified reporting dashboard. We eliminated hours of manual work each week and have allowed our clients real-time access to campaign performance data.”
Callie DiZillo
Vice President, Paid Social, CMI Media Group
Correctly weighing data signals becomes our top focus
“The digital marketing ecosystem has benefited from the ability to apply cutting edge technology at every new development, and while each independent data partner advances their identity graphs at pace with global initiatives, it becomes our job at PulsePoint to aggregate and weight those data signals in order to ultimately focus and prioritize advertising efforts in favor of the healthcare professional and consumer. Our clients and our DSP must advocate for the end consumer above all, and orienting our data interoperability to be sensitive to the human beings behind the data points gives us a clear north star—seamless understanding and agile deployment of brand messaging that resonates and comforts.”
Becky Hallam
Group Vice President, Platform Solutions, PulsePoint
Agentic Workflows
2026 is the year to unleash AI and machine learning. But it won’t be all magic and miracles.
AI moves from buzzword to audience builder
“Last year, 2025, AI was undoubtedly the buzzword. But for us in 2026, we're moving beyond the hype to, 'What does this actually mean in practice?' We're now deeply integrating AI into nearly every facet of our work. From a targeting perspective, this means we're increasingly leaning into sophisticated AI-driven algorithms, which are being meticulously trained on our audiences. The machine learning intelligence driving these systems is smarter and more precise than ever. We're confidently yielding more control to these algorithms, empowering them to determine who is the right person to engage, where, and when, effectively removing the traditional constraints that once limited our precision and reach.”
Alexandra Gilson
Senior Vice President, Paid Social, CMI Media Group
AI is optimizing bids on a more granular level
“Bid factors have been in place for a while: the ability to adjust how much we're bidding on certain inventory, time of day, etc. But the ability to do that in an automated fashion and take into account the individual user is where I've seen AI really grow our abilities within the programmatic space. Adjusting our bids in real time is exceptionally powerful, especially when a bid's unique ID signals that it's highly likely to be from our target audience.”
Molly Farrell
Senior Vice President, Programmatic, CMI Media Group
AI gives us the time to do more meaningful work
“AI has enabled us to synthesize big research and data sets at significantly quicker speeds, which allows our team to focus on strategic research opportunities and shifts time away from the mundane tasks traditionally associated with data mining. The use of AI for administrative tasks has also allowed our team to get clients what they need a lot quicker, and our internal teams are building new frameworks to manage their teams more effectively. Freeing up this time means we can put efforts toward an even deeper focus on strategy, storytelling, and continuing to build for the future.”
Julie Hurvitz Aliaga
Executive Vice President of Innovation, Content and Partnerships, CMI Media Group
We still can’t just flip a switch; Vet your AI tools
“Leveraging AI in pharma marketing is going to be trial and error, trial and effort. We need to ensure the output is really a more efficient way of doing the task. However we choose to leverage this technology or this new way of working, it needs to still be vetted regardless of how amazing we all think it's going to be. It's not just flipping the switch and the model or workflow produces the outcomes we want.”
Andrew Miller
Executive Vice President, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
Beware of AI slop; Speed without strategy is just faster failure
“Picture this: You're a marketer sitting across from a vendor. They're showing you a slick demo. The AI does something impressive in seconds. They talk about transformation, efficiency, and the future. What they don't talk about is what happens after you sign. This is the moment we're in. And it's time to call it what it is: AI slop—half-baked solutions rushed to market because they can be built quickly, not because they should be built at all. Technology hasn't changed the fundamental question we should be asking. It just made it easier to skip asking it. Yes, AI has accelerated what's possible. What used to take months of engineering time can now happen in weeks or days. But here's what hasn't changed: the need to think through the challenge in front of us. The danger isn't that AI can't deliver on technical capability. It's that speed becomes its own justification. 'We can build it fast' becomes confused with 'we should build it.' And that's how we end up with slop—technically functional but strategically worthless outputs that solve problems nobody had. Just because highly skilled engineers can now build something in a fraction of the time doesn't mean we should stop asking: What value does this actually create? We, and the industry, need to refuse to let velocity replace rigor.”
Ezra Suveyke
Chief Product Officer, PulsePoint
Does AI get the nuance of our world?
“With ongoing updates to privacy legislation on a state-by-state basis, human intervention and oversight is critical. We're in a nuanced world in the healthcare space; there's a lot more to consider to get it right. Can an AI tool understand the details, evaluate what it means for a specific state, how it may impact or apply to other states? Maybe, probably, but I don't think it's going to be overnight.”
Clifton Covey
Senior Vice President, Group Director, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
Human empathy, authenticity must be preserved at all costs
“There's a lot of good that comes with AI like smarter algorithms, faster workflows, and efficiencies, which will continue to be a trend. However, moving away from the human aspect that goes into media and marketing is a risk. The best strategies and creatives are built on empathy and human insight. I do think AI will continue to be a powerful framework for how teams, agencies and marketers stay nimble, but that authenticity needs to stay at the core.”
Bari Maniff
Group Senior Vice President, Engagement Strategy, CMI Media Group
The winners in AI don’t have it figured out yet
“In their modern form, agentic workflows are barely three years old. Defining the ‘right’ evaluation criteria for these systems and tools today is like declaring the most important features of a commercial website back in 1996. You’d be wrong. Or at least incomplete. Back then, the killer website criterion wasn’t one-click checkout. It was whether the page could actually load before the user simply gave up. Agentic AI workflows are at the same stage. The winners won’t be those who picked perfectly early, but those who kept learning the longest.”
Malcolm Halle
Vice President, Sales, PulsePoint
Human relationships will reiGn supreme in our industry
“From my perspective, AI should be used to generate insights, identify trends and patterns within numbers, and automate massive sets of data—a fundamental requirement of the programmatic ecosystem. And while AI can speed up the outputs of these signals or datasets, humans should remain responsible for communication across teams and companies in a way that preserves and reinforces relationships and trust in the industry—ultimately minimizing 'source doubt' to remain efficient and productive.”
Becky Hallam
Group Vice President, Platform Solutions, PulsePoint
Moving Toward Automation Checklist
In our move toward agentic workflows, it's really more important than ever to have:
Proper strategies upfront of what we're trying to achieve
Proper communication
Proper approval processes
Conversations with our data privacy lawyers, technology lawyers, and AI boards (within our agencies and our clients)
Education and ongoing training at scale
Processes, tools and technologies to ensure compliance (internally and across clients)
Consistent vetting of potential partners on a one-to-one basis
Mechanisms to make sure that once we make these decisions there is no room for error
Clifton Covey
Senior Vice President, Group Director,
Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
How to Ensure AI is Bringing Value to Marketers in 2026
Challenge your vendors. Don't accept demos as proof. Ask for production case studies. Ask for client references who've been live for 12+ months. Ask what happens when things break.
Challenge yourself. Just because you can implement an AI tool doesn't mean you should. What value will it create? How will you measure it? What's your kill criteria if it doesn't deliver?
Challenge the ROI conversation. Revenue matters, but so does how you're spending your team's time and focus. Every tool you adopt, every workflow you change, every integration you undertake—these are investments. Are you getting returns?
Ezra Suveyke
Chief Product Officer, PulsePoint
HCP–DTC Omnichannel
Reaching HCPs and consumers in silos simply isn’t good enough anymore.
Aligned targeting, consistent messages, and holistic reporting are now possible
“We're seeing amazing results with the clients that have implemented DTC-HCP synergies and strategies. It all starts with strategic synergies between the targeting. We have always been able to target our highest value HCPs, but rather than just targeting patients diagnosed with a potential condition, it's targeting patients diagnosed with a potential condition who are also patients of our target list HCPs. Then we need to ensure those strategies have consistent messaging across both audiences to create those synergies to introduce really powerful conversations between patients and their doctors. This makes it so we're not only reaching the HCP and hoping we're reaching their patients using a really broad data set, but we're creating those synergies, aligning the messaging, and having both the patient and their provider come to the office with similar topics in mind. I think the most powerful aspect of this is the measurement that we can now do. We can see the impact when we just reach an HCP, when we just reach a patient, and when we reach both. And the results kind of stamp themselves.”
Clifton Covey
Senior Vice President, Group Director, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
Audience identity alone doesn’t drive success
“We know we want to target HCPs. We know we want to target patients. But ultimately where we need to get to for this alignment is not relying so much on that part of the audience's identity. What's more important is, once we do reach those people, how are we catering their experience in real time. If we're able to, in real time, adjust budget, platforms, what channel we're hitting them in, what creative are they receiving within that channel because of those signals, we’ll provide them with the optimal user experience. That's ultimately where we need to get to because that is the only way we will ever build trust, which is the most important metric we could possibly have in this industry. If we just cookie cut everything and say, ‘Oh, we knew you were an HCP up front, so we gave you the HCP creative,’ you're not building trust. You're just blasting them with a templated marketing strategy.”
Andrew Miller
Executive Vice President, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
The foundational enabler of HCP–DTC is understanding the physician
“The list of requirements is long, from a sizable list of data and data management requirements—including real-time behavioral data—to the ad tech platform having specific capabilities necessary for health. The most foundational enabler is actually knowing the doctor. It's easy to achieve a reasonably good match rate; what actually matters is what is the 24-hour or 7-day realized reach—how quickly you can find and reach each doctor across their devices (not just one). In the absence of strong realized reach in short time intervals, it's impossible for any HCP-DTC solution to scale.”
Parker Noren
Senior Vice President, Growth and Strategy, PulsePoint, Medscape, and WebMD
Alignment is achieved through coordination across HCP and DTC channels
“To achieve alignment, we're focusing on using shared audience signals and coordinated activation triggers rather than treating channels independently. Leveraging synergistic audience strategies like using patient-level propensity data to identify individuals who are most likely connected to HCPs in our target list lets us orchestrate DTC education when we know conversations with their HCPs are most likely to occur, creating a more connected experience across audiences. We also use contextual and environmental triggers such as seasonal or weather-based condition players. When we know symptom severity tends to spike, we can amplify patient-facing messaging while reinforcing HCP content on diagnosis or treatment guidance through the same windows. We're also expanding reach beyond traditional channels by using CTV and programmatic video targeting to reach audiences in high-quality, brand-safe environments and mirroring those segments in paid social. This ensures audiences see an aligned story arc across platforms that they naturally engage in.”
Callie DiZillo
Vice President, Paid Social, CMI Media Group
Influencer content can bridge audiences
“I think we’ll see influencer-type content pick up in the HCP sphere. While it’s a little bit more difficult because it also comes with needing to share HCP safety information that tends to be longer, with the right person you’ll find synergies. For example, if you can find someone who appeals to a dual audience of HCPs and patients, you can definitely find a lot of efficiencies and drive results in both.”
Josh Simon
Group Senior Vice President, Centered. CMI Media Group
Alignment requires leaving antiquated approaches behind
“The days of working in silos must end. Every team and audience needs to be connected to the same story in order to succeed. We are moving media closer to content, and HCP closer to DTC strategies. Doing so will save time and money, and provide consumers with a more unified experience. Gone are the days of looking at a program as 'just for HCPs' or ‘just for patients and caregivers.' We need to embrace the change that is happening; patients', caregivers', and HCPs' content needs to be more closely aligned to each other. We have patients doing much more research on their own than they have done in years or even generations past. In order to adapt to this change, it is our job as marketers to funnel messaging and content in a way that more smartly reaches both audiences and connects them organically. Both audiences are looking for trust and accurate information from their brands first and foremost, and that is what unifies us all together.”
Julie Hurvitz Aliaga
Executive Vice President of Innovation, Content and Partnerships, CMI Media Group
Trust in messaging matters—HCP and DTC harmony
“Consumers need to feel trust and authenticity, and that must be earned. Creating opportunities that connect a patient to their caregiver and then to their HCP is vital. Likewise, connecting your organic content strategy to your paid strategy is imperative for any consumer experience. Trust is organically occurring online in communities like Reddit where patients are meeting other patients they have never met before. Additionally, they could engage with care experts and HCPs from across the country. It is important to think about the content you are putting out there, how it will 'perform' organically, and think to yourself, 'If this content is not resonating organically, why would it resonate with a paid push?' Further, once you have established the type of content that will resonate, it is time to link the HCP and DTC audiences closer together. These audiences are the ones working together in the doctor’s office, so let's get them closer to each other online. A great example of connecting audiences is a recent influencer program we executed that was designed for a care team expert to speak directly to the patient (HCP to DTC targeting). This built trust for a patient program and allowed regulatory teams to feel confident in messaging being delivered authentically to patients from a trusted provider. This is an idea that was foreign to us in years past but will continue to grow in 2026. Get your teams and strategies talking!”
Julie Hurvitz Aliaga
Executive Vice President of Innovation, Content and Partnerships, CMI Media Group
Focus on the audiences showing the highest receptivity
“Truly connecting the HCP to the consumer has taken center stage for many brands' marketing efforts in the digital health space. Educating the HCP and consumer in silos simply is not good enough anymore. At PulsePoint, we are focused on prioritizing the audiences who are most relevant and ensuring that brand budgets are allocated to the HCPs and consumers who are showing the most receptivity to learning more and progressing the dialogue. Connecting these audiences starts with understanding the HCP: how do they practice, do their clinical behaviors align with the payer status in their state or region, what type of digital content do they engage along with other leading indicators? From there, we can start to better understand the patient populations they treat and focus our media efforts/budget on cohorts of individuals who are most likely to be aligned to specific HCPs. The most effective way of doing this in the programmatic space is through intelligent optimization strategies that hone in on audiences who are most receptive to messaging based on what we know about their digital and clinical tendencies at the moment.”
Keith Matt
Group Vice President, Sales, PulsePoint
Pharma marketing hasn’t meaningfully achieved HCP–DTC harmony
“The industry has failed to make legitimate progress toward its own north star. Worse, solutions that have promised to provide HCP–DTC coordination inevitably have been sub-scale or simply insights reporting with no ability to directly take action. We took a step back and asked, 'HCP–DTC alignment and harmony... for the purposes of what?' We didn't feel like the industry had answered this question meaningfully. We're now focused on creating connectivity primarily for two purposes. For clinicians, their days are so chaotic that receptivity to a brand is dictated by the patient encounters they are preparing for; consumer signals can inform HCP campaigns on when is the best moment to focus on each individual doctor. For consumers, who their doctor is has a significant impact on probable treatment approach. The clinician informs the consumer campaign to focus more budget on consumer cohorts where the brand has a chance to be adopted.”
Parker Noren
Senior Vice President, Growth and Strategy, PulsePoint, Medscape, and WebMD
Direct to Consumer Optimization
DTC optimization is entering a new phase: Performance matters more, and tolerance for waste is shrinking.
DTC advertising will get even more personalized
“AI and better data flow will make DTC far more predictive and personalized. We’ll movefaster on creative testing, targeting, and cross channel coordination. At the same time, privacy changes and shifting consumer behavior will force us to lean harder on first-party data, contextual targeting, and creativity that actually earns attention.”
Mark Pappas
Executive Vice President, Innovation, CMI Media Group
Tolerance for waste continues to wane
“As technology advances and we gain an even deeper understanding of specific audiences, the acceptance around waste in consumer programs is certainly waning. There is an understanding that consumer audiences need to be built in a specific way to align to compliance requirements but we're super excited about leveraging our unique technology at PulsePoint to enhance the performance of these audiences through compliant optimization strategies that ultimately educate consumers and drive better patient outcomes.”
Keith Matt
Group Vice President, Sales, PulsePoint
We need to stop blaming DTC waste on legal and regulatory
“The industry’s tolerance for accepting waste in DTC marketing is waning and the reason is simple: The DTC market is inefficient. In economics, an inefficient market means prices don’t reflect all available information. DTC marketing works the same way. We’re misallocating massive budgets because we often don’t have (or haven’t acted on) the information about who actually wants to be educated about their health and therapy options. So we default to blanket reach and blame the waste on 'legal & regulatory.' What’s changing is that the information gap is closing and we are moving toward a more efficient market. We’re getting better at understanding intent, not identity. We’re getting better at optimizing based on signals that indicate who is actively seeking education. And once you see that inefficiency, it’s hard to justify under-educating people asking to learn about products that can drastically improve or even save their lives.”
Malcolm Halle
Vice President, Sales, PulsePoint
Influencer content is the next big opportunity for pharma
“For the first time in social media, we've been able to introduce a bit of informality to our content, and it’s been delivering great results. That influencer-type content tends to perform better than your standard brand-created content because it seems like consumers tend to trust it a bit more. Historically in pharma, content was largely overproduced because it had to be. I think we'll start to see more of that content pick up, while still balancing that typical brand content in 2026.”
Josh Simon
Group Senior Vice President, Centered, CMI Media Group
Agility needs to become the new standard for creative
“A critical shift in pharma advertising is recognizing the need for agility from its very inception. That's why we're prioritizing the upfront design and approval of variable, dynamic creative. This proactive strategy provides us with unparalleled flexibility when building creative for our ad campaigns. Crucially, by securing dynamic creative approval from the outset, we empower our algorithms to intelligently serve ads where they predict users are most likely to take a desired action, always optimizing for the best possible outcome.”
Alexandra Gilson
Senior Vice President of Paid Social, CMI Media Group
Tech plus human input drives the highest results
“We have tested automated platform-driven optimizations versus automated plus human, and automated plus human always outperforms just automated. Automation tools are still in their infancy, and as a trader, you understand the nuances of the client and know when to be more aggressive than the algorithm. For example, take a campaign that's optimizing toward CTR. The algorithm is going to prioritize some in-app mobile gaming inventory that's driving an absurd CTR. But we know as humans that that user experience on those platforms isn’t always great. So, while it might be driving the performance that the algorithm is looking for, it's not the experience that the brand wants for their consumers. Systems don't know that yet, but we do as traders.”
Molly Farrell
Senior Vice President, Programmatic, CMI Media Group
Balance broad and targeted approaches for best results
“As an industry, we’ve become hyper-focused on highly targeted strategies and endemic channels that promise precision. But, that approach may unintentionally exclude important parts of our audience, such as caregivers or a new physician who is also a consumer. I think it’s time for a shake-up, a more fair balance that pairs targeted tactics with broader reach. We’ve seen it’s not actually wasteful when using a broad-based targeting approach and leveraging channels that we all use in our day-to-day lives, outside of just the endemic must-haves. We've been able to get smarter about minimizing waste and being more intentional with the type of waste that we’re willing to accept.”
Bari Maniff
Group Senior Vice President, Engagement Strategy, CMI Media Group
It’s time to go beyond audience quality
“I've talked at scale about the challenges of relying solely on audience quality. It obviously provides great insight into the likelihood of reaching your intended audience in any given buy or data set and that is great. The challenge is that it's not necessarily real time and once you have that data, it often doesn't see a ton of fluctuation over time. Therefore it's a huge challenge to provide data to fuel real-time optimization. But, if you're able to pair that audience quality metric, understanding where you can reach the audiences most likely to be our patients, with high value actions that shows intent of those audiences, then we're able to narrow in on the highest quality patients who are most likely to be in the intent mode, and even narrow in within those audiences to optimize to people who may be interested in talking to their doctors at that moment in time."
Clifton Covey
Senior Vice President, Group Director, Digital Activation, CMI Media Group
DTC spending to rise, but strategy shifts
Spotlight
DTC spending is expected to rise in 2026; but traditional linear TV spend as the centerpiece of that strategy is waning.
Instead, it’s shifting to other digital channels like social, display, search, and video (CTV). According to Fierce Pharma, digital pharma ad spending is forecast to come in at $26.2 billion in 2026, while traditional channels will come in at a smaller $6.9 billion.
Acknowledgments
PulsePoint and CMI Media Group would like to extend a special thank you to the leaders who participated in brainstorming sessions, insight-generating interviews, and rigorous reviews to compile this report.
CMI Media Group, a WPP company (NYSE: WPP, www.wpp.com) is a global, full-service media agency focused solely on health, wellness, and pharmaceutical marketing. CMI Media Group’s core offerings include Audience Strategy, Planning, Development, and Insights; Data and Analytics; Buying and Investment; and Direct Response and Customer Experience. As the leading media resource for the world’s top healthcare companies, CMI Media Group brings together leading technology, data, and talent to deliver seamless capabilities for clients. CMI Media Group has been recognized as a leader in inclusivity, talent retention and employee development as well as one of the industry’s best places to work. To apply for a position within our teams visit (www.cmimediagroup.com/careers/)
PulsePoint is a leading healthcare marketing platform that uses real-world data in real time to optimize advertising campaign performance and revolutionize health decision-making.
Leveraging proprietary, first-party datasets and methodology, PulsePoint targets healthcare professionals and patient populations with an unprecedented level of accuracy—delivering unparalleled results to the clients we serve.
PulsePoint is part of the Internet Brand family, joining Medscape and WebMD as the world’s largest healthcare marketing ecosystem. For more information, visit PulsePoint.com pulsepoint.com.