December 30, 2025
Our work puts us in constant conversation with the people shaping healthcare marketing. Across our blog, our podcast, and discussions at our AdLab Healthcare Marketing Summit earlier this year, we heard candid perspectives on what’s changing, what’s working, and where there’s still room to improve.
As we look back on the year, a few themes surfaced again and again. These were ideas that energized us and pushed our thinking forward. Here are seven ways our clients and partners inspired us, in their own words.
1. Health equity starts with authenticity, not optics
When the conversation turns to health equity, it’s easy for the focus to drift toward checklists and statements of intent. But as Holly Dunn, Managing Director, Performance at Havas Media Network reminded us on Deep: The Health Marketing Podcast, real progress starts somewhere much deeper. “It's about being authentic,” she said. “Not just checking a box saying that, yes, we have a diversity program, or we’re focused on health equity. It's about truly finding solutions that enable people to be healthy, happy, and ultimately live longer lives.”
That sentiment came up again in a Deep episode featuring Kate Gattuso Duffy, Omnichannel Orchestration Product Lead at Pfizer, who emphasized the importance of experimenting with new methods, especially when working with audiences that are historically underserved or overlooked. “[It’s about] being more aligned to testing and learning versus being so focused on an exact prescriptive method…With audiences that are so niche, so undiscovered, that need so much support and education, I think it’s important to do and learn different things.”
These perspectives reinforce that equity is something you build, iteratively and thoughtfully, by staying close to real patient needs and being willing to learn along the way.
2. Relevance beats reach in a shifting healthcare landscape
As patient behaviors and information pathways continue to fragment, our partners at PurpleLab emphasized the growing importance of relevance over sheer scale. “By focusing on the right audiences at the right moments in their health journey,” they explained on the DeepDive, “marketers can maximize budgets while driving impact where it matters most.”
They also pointed to the role of real-world evidence in making smarter decisions earlier. “By tying every marketing decision back to real-world evidence, we help organizations identify the right audiences, prioritize market opportunities, allocate budgets better, and measure success, not just after campaigns end but also as they’re being designed with in-flight optimization capabilities.”
Campaigns with greater precision are both more efficient and more effective. In a fast-moving marketplace, relevance is what keeps marketing meaningful.
3. Breaking through requires real connection
With audiences more informed and more selective than ever about what earns their attention, relevance is table stakes. That’s true whether you’re trying to reach a clinician juggling a packed schedule or a patient navigating a deeply personal health journey. On our podcast, William Veltre, EVP and Head of Media at The Deerfield Group, said that, “we have to be tailored in order to grab their attention…you really have to know the audience and the story that you’re ultimately positioning the product for.”
That focus on relevance starts with empathy. Bill described healthcare as “the best industry… because there’s heart behind everything that we do. It’s an empathetic industry,” and emphasized that effective communication begins with understanding the patient deeply. That means asking what people are struggling with and what barriers they’re facing before deciding how or where to try to reach them. This represents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to genuinely support people through complex decisions.
This mindset is especially important in an era of the informed patient. As Bill noted, “the informed patient is such a unique opportunity,” because having the ability to choose and have a say in treatment based on the knowledge you’ve obtained is “such a powerful place to sit as a patient.” Meeting HCPs and patients in ways that are relevant, meaningful, and timely ensures that healthcare marketing plays a constructive role in the care journey.
4. The most powerful campaigns live at the intersection of credibility and emotion
Integrated campaigns came up repeatedly, but not in the abstract. For example, Mukund Jain, SVP and General Manager at Healthgrades, expressed it in a way that stuck with us by calling out the physician-patient conversation, a moment in the journey that too often gets overlooked. “To me it is the crucible where clinician credibility meets human emotion…Most marketers think about awareness and intent, and they neglect that conversation-readiness.”
That idea frames how we, as health advertisers, ought to think about integration. Success is about preparing people for real conversations. When channels, messages, and moments are connected, brands help people feel ready to act.
5. AI’s biggest promise is freeing people to think more strategically
The AI hype was everywhere this year, but some leaders did a particularly good job distilling its impact. At our AdLab Health Marketing Summit this year, Alfred Whitehead, EVP of Applied Sciences at Klick, spoke about the potential of new reasoning and deep research models to synthesize massive amounts of scientific information. “Having an AI that can read 2000 scientific papers and give you sort of the deep insights there to share…I think when that gets applied to social media, it’s going to be super interesting.”
Parvati Vaish, Director of Strategy at Veeva Crossix, built on that idea, imagining a future where tools are better connected and feedback loops are tighter. “Ideally, we are rapidly creating and deploying and measuring our assets and markets so that we can continue refining more effectively.”
Oleg Korenfeld, CTO at CMI Media Group, grounded the conversation in AI’s ability to raise the standards of all of our work. “Taking hours and hours of manual process and automating it…it’s creating that time for our teams and elevating them in the eyes of our clients as true strategic partners.”
6. Confidence and clarity matter in a complex legal environment
On our podcast, James Potter of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication (CHC) offered a timely reminder about the importance of consistency and conviction, especially amid ongoing scrutiny of healthcare advertising.
He argued that real progress, whether in policy or public health, comes from sustained, coordinated messaging grounded in evidence. Advertising, in his view, plays a critical role in reinforcing awareness and normalizing conversations about care.
Rather than reacting defensively to critical headlines or annoyance-driven rhetoric, he encouraged industry leaders to stay anchored in the facts, understand their legal footing, and confidently articulate the value of advertising as part of a functioning healthcare system.
7. CTV is no longer optional. It’s foundational.
Conversations around connected TV made it abundantly clear that CTV isn’t an experiment anymore. “[CTV] has enabled more of an agile mindset when it comes to video,” said Erin Nocito, Executive Director and Head of Global Media at Amgen, at AdLab. Kevin Kammeyer, Director, US Media Operations at Gilead, pointed to its accessibility, especially for brands that previously couldn’t play in video at scale: “[CTV is] a way for us to be able to now target through a video platform that we just couldn’t before.”
Alice Harmon, Director, Omnichannel Analytics and Strategy at Lundbeck, summed up where things are headed. “We have a brand that’s 100% CTV now…As we move forward, CTV is going to become more and more important. We have no choice but to move in that direction.”
The shift is well underway, and the brands leaning in thoughtfully are the ones setting themselves up for 2026 and beyond.
Looking ahead
What stood out most across these conversations was the way leaders are thinking about their responsibility in healthcare marketing today. Whether the topic was equity, relevance, AI, media evolution, or regulation, the throughline was a clear commitment to doing this work thoughtfully and with purpose.
We’re grateful to the clients, partners, and friends who shared their perspectives so openly throughout the year, and we’re proud to learn alongside them. If this year taught us anything, it’s that progress in healthcare marketing comes from staying grounded in real people, real needs, and the real impact our work can have.
