Traditional healthcare marketing has long relied on a familiar strategy: engaging medical experts in professional settings such as industry conferences, medical journals, healthcare social networks, and specialized media outlets.
These channels remain important, but media consumption has changed dramatically.
Healthcare professionals (HCPs) no longer consume content in a handful of predictable places. Like everyone else, they move across devices, platforms, and experiences throughout the day. They listen to podcasts, stream video content, scroll social feeds, and engage with entertainment during downtime. They also play games.
This raises two critical questions for healthcare marketers:
- If HCP strategies are built primarily around professional contexts, are advertisers overlooking moments where HCP audiences are already highly engaged?
- If gaming is a viable HCP channel, how can healthcare marketers intelligently bring this channel into their omnichannel strategy?
“Healthcare professionals don’t stop being people when they leave the clinic. If we’re serious about omnichannel marketing, we have to follow real human behavior, not outdated assumptions about where attention lives. Gaming isn’t replacing traditional healthcare media; it’s expanding the moments where meaningful engagement can happen.” — Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer, Butler/Till
Gaming is no longer a niche behavior
Gaming today looks very different than how many marketers still imagine.
Gaming has evolved into an everyday behavior across demographics and lifestyles, including busy medical professionals. Whether it is a quick puzzle session like Wordle during a commute, casual play like Candy Crush while watching television, or time spent unwinding after work, gaming increasingly reflects how people spend their downtime.
What makes gaming especially interesting for healthcare marketers is not simply the scale of audiences, it is the quality of attention these environments create. Attention and time spent is rivaling that of social and CTV.
Unlike passive media environments, audiences actively choose to participate. They are engaged in the experience, and committed to the challenge of the game, rather than passively consuming content around it.
For advertisers seeking to reach healthcare professionals with demanding schedules and increasingly fragmented media habits, these moments create opportunities to engage with these audiences in ways that traditional environments alone may not.
If you’re not yet convinced, here are some stats that show the value of gaming as an engaging and emerging channel to reach HCPs:
- Gaming falls in the “Hobbies & Interests” IAB category, which is the top category of consumption for HCPs.
- Gaming has higher engagement stats, like page views or impressions per user than other hobbies that fall into this category
- PulsePoint data reveals that HCPs under 40 spend 1.4x as much time on gaming as those over 60
- PulsePoint data also shows nurses and physician assistants spend 2x as much on gaming
This means there are pockets of your lists who are heavily into gaming and you can build a nuanced media plan to benefit from this.
“There's a difference between an audience seeing an ad and an audience choosing to be somewhere. Gaming is the latter. HCPs are there because they want to be, mid-puzzle or mid-match, fully invested in what's in front of them. That kind of voluntary focus is hard to manufacture in any other channel, and it's worth healthcare marketers' attention precisely because it doesn't ask HCPs to give up the professional media they already rely on. It just meets them somewhere else they already are. Done right, it's not a competing channel, it's an added layer of engagement on top of everything already working.” - Chris Feo, SVP Global Ads & Partnerships, Unity
Expanding HCP reach beyond traditional healthcare environments
As questions around audience fit and measurement continue to evolve, healthcare marketers are beginning to explore how gaming can support broader, measurable audience strategies.
By bringing together healthcare audiences, media expertise, and premium gaming environments, Butler/Till, PulsePoint, and Unity have joined forces to help healthcare marketers extend reach and frequency.
The collaboration is already beginning to take shape through an ongoing video campaign with a gastrointestinal pharmaceutical brand using Unity’s in-app gaming inventory accessed via the PulsePoint platform.
The pharma brand sought to match HCP audience lists to reach their target list and drive positive prescription lift, with the goal of extending incremental reach and creating more consistent audience engagement. Through the PulsePoint platform, Butler/Till matched those HCP audiences with Unity’s premium mobile gaming supply and early results are already beginning to show promising outcomes, including:
- Video completion rate between 45%-50% for a creative that's 60 seconds
- HCPs they are reaching have higher historical TRx, NRx & NBRx
- One campaign shows HCPs with 12% higher TRx
- Another campaign shows 21% higher TRx
“Healthcare professionals research, game, stream, scroll and PulsePoint exists to help marketers effectively reach them wherever they are and when they are most receptive. This partnership is an extension of that omnichannel promise: verified HCP audiences, now in gaming environments, with measurable prescription lift and outcomes that hold up.” - Konrad Gerszke, CEO of PulsePoint.
These results show that with the right HCP data, adding gaming to your omnichannel marketing strategy is a strategic advantage.
Interested in adding gaming to your HCP omnichannel strategy?
The future of HCP marketing will not simply be about finding new audiences. It will be about creating smarter ways to reach them more consistently across media channels where they are most engaged and receptive to receiving a marketing message.
Butler/Till, PulsePoint, and Unity are helping healthcare marketers unlock new opportunities for reach, frequency, and engagement where attention already exists.
If you’re interested in learning more about adding gaming into your omnichannel strategy, contact us today.
