Scaling Efficiently: A Conversation with Marketing Experts from Bayer and Neurocrine

Scaling Efficiently: A Conversation with Marketing Experts from Bayer and Neurocrine

At PulsePoint’s 2025 HealthNEXT Summit in New York City, participants and panelists discussed the most pressing issues healthcare marketers are facing today, as well as new tools and techniques that are transforming the space. In a panel on “Redefining Health Media: Precision at Scale Without the Waste,” attendees heard from experts in digital media activation and omnichannel strategy about how their teams are scaling their precision targeting without sacrificing efficiency.

Moderated by Becky Hallam, SVP of Platform at PulsePoint, the conversation featured expert insights from:

• Glenniss Richards, Senior Director, Digital Media Activation, Bayer
• Milet Koo, Associate Director, Omnichannel Strategy, Neurocrine

Here are the top takeaways from their discussion.

Improve Content to Drive Efficiency 

For Glenniss, most inefficiency comes down to targeting and content. The content must make sense within the media strategy. “You do miss the mark when you're advertising messaging that's not relevant to your target base.” she said. “So there's a lot of inefficiencies there.”

Milet agreed that poorly personalized content and messaging is a problem for many healthcare marketers. “We are figuratively and literally not speaking to our audiences through content,” she said. Pharma marketing language tends to be cold and clinical, but we must remember who we’re speaking to—whether it’s patients who have just been given a startling diagnosis, busy HCPs, or concerned caregivers. “And the biggest inefficiency is not tailoring your content to make it native to that platform you're on,” she added.

Glenniss expanded on that idea. ”You can have the best budgets, the best tech stack, the most precise targeting, but that's only gonna take you so far,” she said. “At least 50% of the equation is attributed to your messaging and your brand positioning.”

Redefine Reach and Messaging

While strategies are different for every organization based on their size, their audiences, where they are in the market, etc., all brand marketers have to anticipate change. Milet cautioned that you can’t just craft a media plan and assume it’s going to stay the same for a year, which is why the two main things she plans for in a campaign are agility and personalization.

“Personalization is so important to me because we have the tools, the technology,” she said. “We have partners like PulsePoint that brought us here today to help influence those model mixes and those media plans.” When you’re talking about efficiency, listen to your agency partners, she added.

It’s a little different for in-house teams like Glenniss’ that do it all under one roof, from planning, strategy and research to analytics. She said their success comes from transparency and trust within the team, as well as establishing a centralized arm managing the entire digital ecosystem. “Centralization is critical,” she said. They’ve redefined their reach and messaging by reducing fragmentation and inefficiencies. 

Reaching audiences is about leveraging precision targeting as well as the right content, Glenniss added. “We hang our hats on health-based segments from a DTC perspective, and then also use PulsePoint as an arm to push all of our audiences across all of the walled gardens. So that's really important there.”

Build a Strategy with Dynamic Audiences

Milet said she looks at three foundational areas when putting a media plan together: social media, paid search, and programmatic display. But no matter the plan, she recognizes that nothing is set in stone. “Do I turn things on and off automatically? No, I pull levers. I make concerted strategic conversations with my brand partners.” 

No matter the campaign, Glenniss said her team starts with research, data, and planning tools. “We're always going to start and ground ourselves with understanding who our ideal patient is, who are the HCPs that we're looking to target, what are the barriers, whether it's a rare disease or larger brand.” 

For rare disease campaigns with smaller budgets, marketers have to be even more strategic about finding their audiences. “I would say on the rare disease side of the house, the media strategy is slightly different in that you are focused on where you can make the biggest impact on say, barriers to treatment, barriers to screening, barriers to diagnosis,” Milet said. “Where exactly are you going to make the biggest impact?”

When operating in an oversaturated media market, she recognized that volume is helpful, but it still all comes down to content and flexibility. “Omnichannel truly means you have to have the content for that specific channel or tactic,” she said. “Move wisely, slowly, and iteratively.” 

Glenniss said her team pays close attention to how often they’re refreshing their audiences, relying on partners to update lists and avoid oversaturation. “You can’t set it, forget it, and go. We’re calling on our data providers on a regular basis to update our audiences to avoid any saturation for our brands.”

The Next Five Years

For the final question of the panel, the speakers were asked what they envision in the healthcare space in the next five years, and what they would like to see.

As a former caregiver for her mother, Milet said she would like to see more remote patient monitoring tools and wearable sensors. “Think about all the things that wearable sensors and constant patient monitoring tools and technology could do for us,” she said. “Not only make sure that we have the right marketing plan in front of them, in front of their physicians, but also hopefully lead to better lives for patients.”

Glenniss said she isn’t thinking about what will happen in the next five years; she’s more focused on right now. She keeps herself in the present by asking questions like, “How are we continuously building on the infrastructure for right now? How do we leverage AI? How do we keep pushing forward?” And, most importantly, “What am I doing today and tomorrow to get in front of the right patient at the right time?”

In Conclusion

Today’s DTC and HCP targeting solutions are more robust and precise than ever before, but marketers can’t rely on a “set it and forget it” approach. Glenniss and Milet demonstrated that implementing efficient campaigns requires thoughtful content strategy, constant communication with internal teams and partners, and a mindset that’s focused on quality over quantity.

With PulsePoint’s new Adaptive Optimization™, an AI-powered optimization tool, marketers can access clinical signals in near real time to improve qualified audience reach and increase campaign efficiency. Adaptive Optimization makes it easier to refresh audiences based on specific clinical behaviors, which means audiences are only getting the messages that are most relevant to them.

We hope you have enjoyed this blog post series highlighting the top takeaways from HealthNEXT 2025. Want to be involved in our next event? Contact the team here.

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