It’s a Match! How CTV and Omnichannel Are Finally Finding Each Other

PulsePoint’s annual HealthNEXT Summit focuses on the most pressing issues health marketers face today. This year’s summit, hosted in New York City, was a high-impact, single-day event where the industry’s top doers, thinkers, and innovators came together to discuss how health marketing is changing and what they can do to future-proof their strategies.

This post is part of a series of the top takeaways from each of the summit’s sessions, including expert-led panels and innovation breakouts.

3 Key Takeaways from HealthNEXT’s Breakout Session on Premium CTV

Premium CTV has become an essential part of omnichannel healthcare marketing strategies. But when you have a complex media mix, how can you attribute successes and impact, and how do you ensure your largest investment is pulling its weight?

PulsePoint Head of Supply Partnerships Walker Linares sat down with expert panelists from CTV and streaming for the breakout innovation session, “It’s a Match! How CTV and Omnichannel Are Finally Finding Each Other” to tackle these questions and more. These are the top takeaways.

1. Premium CTV Is an Experience You Create

Defining “premium CTV” isn’t easy—it can be many things, and it means something different to every marketer and every client. The panelists discussed the intersection of content, data, environment, reach, and brand safety in premium CTV, but two criteria rise to the top: first, it comes down to being in control of your content and second, it’s about meeting each client’s specific needs.

• “Premium, to me, is the experience you’re creating for your audience and being in control of that, but then also being very tightly knit together with the people who can sell your inventory if it’s not you,” said Meagan Myers, Vice President of Programmatic Strategy & Partnerships at Fox Corporation.
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• “Having that buyer trust is really important, and if you’re having the right conversations, that’s what premium means to me; making sure that the right people are in the room talking about the right things, and that we can own the moment together,” Meagan added.
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• “Not all CTV providers are created equal, and I think we’re lucky between this group to have very premium offerings out in market,” said Tyler DeNicola, Head of Programmatic at DIRECTV Advertising. “But I do think it's important to make sure that, not only is the audience key—yes, you want to target those specific viewers—but you also are entitled to know where it is that you’re running, and that is of fundamental importance when we look at linear shifting into CTV.” 
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• “Premium today, especially when you look at programmatic, especially when you’re buying through a quality DSP like PulsePoint, is more about, hey, do I know what I’m buying, do I have the data fidelity to layer on audiences, and do I have the attribution models to decide and to understand whether that works?” said Andrew Tint, Vice President of ProgrammaticPartnerships at LG Ad Solutions.
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• “How we inevitably end up talking to our clients about it is to go through that exercise of, okay, how are we defining premium versus non-premium for this activation? What are the audience preferences? What is the story we want to tell? Ultimately, we want to create an additive, not interruptive, experience for the end user,” said Eric Juran, Vice President of Media Strategy at Moon Rabbit. “That’s a benefit of PulsePoint: giving us broad-reaching access to a host of different supply and buying modalities.”

2. Clearly Communicating With Partners Is Essential

CTV can be a powerful medium, but as a high-funnel strategy, it can be difficult to ensure it gets the credit it deserves within an omnichannel campaign. The panelists explored how pharma and healthcare brands can move more of their investment into streaming, some of the biggest obstacles they might face, and their strategies for success.

• “To help demystify, we’ve spent the past two months at Moon Rabbit, for one, researching convergent measurement vendors, but have also invested in a video investment team. So we have some folks that have been in the industry for some time, spanning linear and CTV, that understand how things are bought,” Eric said. 
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• “If you’re speaking different languages in all of your measurement, you’re just piecing it together and hoping it makes sense. That’s where we’re spending time, money, and energy in investing—to be able to understand and take that whole collective picture into play,” Eric added.
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• “One thing that I’ve seen to be the most successful is a completely open communication line … discussing what you’re looking for directly with PulsePoint and then also bringing in the publisher opens up so many doors, and we’ve seen a lot of success there,” Meagan said.
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• “We are a 100% authenticated platform, and because we are authenticated, we have all the user and first-party data associated with that,” Tyler said. “When it comes to working directly with a pharma buyer, we can utilize condition-based segments or first-party data segments tied to HCPs to ensure that we can help fine-tune and strategically find those specific audiences.”
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• “The best plan is to get specific with each partner, and if you’re not clear on what you’re trying to accomplish, or you’re not clear on what the attribution is, things fall through the cracks,” Andrew said. “... Maybe we need to target competitors. Maybe there are certain types of inventory that your partners watch, consume, want to deliver against, and we can create all of that, but we can only do it successfully if we are aligned on what the targeting is and on what the measurement is.” 

3. What’s New in CTV? More Data & Seamless Inventory

Looking forward, there are many opportunities and developments in the world of premium CTV that can take marketers to the next level. The panelists considered the future of CTV and what they’re personally excited to see.

• “You want to tell a cohesive story, but it’s almost impossible to truly know what your reach frequency and deduplication is across all of these buys,” said Eric. “It’s nice to see how much more accessible that is becoming, and I will totally be pushing PulsePoint to help get more of this kind of data … so I’m hopeful that that just continues to get easier and easier to see.”
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• “Being able to provide such premium inventory to buyers is something that really excites me,” Tyler said. “We’ve done a really good job through our carriage agreements … I think there’s a lot of net new supply for sports that we’re introducing to the market, which is great and hones in on that premium aspect.”
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• “If you look back two years, live sports and programmatic was a mess. No one thought that programmatic had any of the tools to be able to deliver seamlessly in a lot of these live events,” Meagan said. “That is changing as more publishers are enabling DAI inventory in sports and also being incredibly bullish about the experience … As we look at live events as a whole, even outside of sports, there’s so much progression in actually making sure we can audience target, deliver the ads on time, and make sure that the user experience is there.”

Keep an eye out for more posts diving into each of the topics we discussed at HealthNEXT 2026. Want to be involved in our next event? Contact the team here.