In the last three to four years something started happening that a lot of people in our industry still think isn’t possible.
We ran compliant HCP targeted programmatic for POM in pharma.
Imagine that you’d done the same. Not using programmatic as a display buy, a pilot or a test channel, but as the system sitting behind your omnichannel activity.
And it changed things. Because that’s what it does.
Not because you spent more money.
Not because you added another tactic.
But because, for the first time, your channels were connected.
Let me explain.
What changed
You started reaching 95–99% of specialists in a given country. So far, so what?
Try this. You started reaching 95–99% of specialists. And you could prove it. And respond to it.
If you’ve worked in this industry for any length of time, you’ll know how extraordinary that is. We’ve spent decades planning around gaps- partial reach, assumed exposure, post-campaign reports that arrive months later.
Suddenly, you weren’t guessing anymore.
Instead of adding your voice into therapy-area noise, you could see what clinicians were engaging with while campaigns were live. Not retrospectively, not in a quarterly debrief but in real time.
Budget moved to what was working. Creative sequencing adapted. Messaging sharpened. And across markets, something else happened.
Local teams still executed in ways that made sense for their environment - because they should. But now you had visibility at a global level. You could see behavioural patterns emerging across territories. You could apply learning from Germany to Italy, from the UK to Spain.
For the first time, global didn’t mean standardised. It meant informed.
And then came the biggest change of all.
You stopped starting from zero.
Every campaign contributed to something cumulative - a growing behavioural dataset, a deeper understanding of real clinicians, not theoretical personas. That asset didn’t disappear at the end of the campaign. It strengthened the next launch. The next indication. The next market entry.
For 15–20 years I’ve said something that used to sound aspirational; every media touchpoint is a data point. Every opportunity to talk is an opportunity to listen.
For the first time in pharma, that’s not an idea. It’s operational reality.
Because this isn’t futuristic. It’s happening now.
But it only works if we stop mislabelling programmatic.
The missing link in omnichannel
We’ve all believed in omnichannel for years.
We know HCPs don’t move in neat silos. They move between endemic media, rep visits, congresses, webinars, email, social - often within the same week.
The ambition has always been coordinated, sequenced engagement.
But in practice, there’s always different teams, different platforms, different KPIs and different timelines.
Signals stay trapped inside channels.
So when things don’t connect, we question strategy, content, channels.
Often the problem isn’t any of those. It’s that there’s no central spine holding it all together. No linking layer that allows one interaction to inform the next.
But that linking layer does exist.
It’s programmatic.
Programmatic is the operating system
For too long, programmatic if used at all for HCPs, has been treated as “the display line” or “the innovation pilot” in a media plan.
That framing massively underestimates it.
When built properly - with compliant HCP identity, verified endemic inventory, automation and AI at its core - programmatic becomes the operating system behind omnichannel.
It connects signals across:
- Endemic publishers
- Social activation
- Video and CTV
- Email journeys
- Sales rep interactions
- Congress and event touchpoints
It enables:
- Real-time sequential messaging
- Behaviour-driven optimisation
- 95–99% reach in defined specialties
- Persistent, cumulative audience intelligence
- Clean integration into your customer data platform
This is where it becomes strategic.
The more signals it receives, the smarter it becomes.
The more campaigns you run, the richer your behavioural layer grows.
And the more accountable your omnichannel activity becomes —not channel by channel, but as a connected system.
We are, genuinely, closing the loop.
Marketing is no longer a fragmented activity. It becomes a connected engine.
But what about compliance?
This is the question that always comes.
Programmatic built its reputation in the consumer world, where open exchanges created understandable concerns about brand safety and control.
Pharma programmatic is different.
We operate in:
- Verified HCP environments
- Endemic clinical publishers
- Whitelisted inventory
- Fully auditable infrastructure
- ABPI / EFPIA aligned governance
If an environment is compliant when booked directly, it is compliant when accessed programmatically.
The technology doesn’t make it risky. The infrastructure makes it scalable - and importantly - measurable.
Why now?
Pharma marketing is changing whether we like it or not.
The next generation of clinicians is digitally native. They expect relevance. They expect intelligent sequencing. They expect that if they engage with something once, the next interaction reflects that.
They don’t experience life in silos — so why do we still plan in silos?
For years, we’ve talked about connected journeys.
Now we can actually build them.
Not by adding more channels — but by connecting the ones we already use.
Programmatic isn’t “more digital”.
It’s the backbone that allows omnichannel to function as a system rather than a collection of tactics.
So what are we waiting for?
I’ve worked in healthcare marketing long enough to knowchange doesn’t happen because technology exists. It happens because someone decides we can do better.
And we can.
We can:
- Wasting insight trapped in individual channels
- Resetting learning at the end of each campaign
- Accepting partial reach as inevitable
- Treating omnichannel as a slide in a deck
Programmatic, done properly and compliantly, gives us:
- Reach at scale
- Real-time intelligence
- Behaviour-driven sequencing
- A cumulative data asset
- A true operating system for omnichannel
If you’d like to talk about what this looks like in your organisation - how it integrates into your CDP, how it works globally and locally, how governance sits around it - let’s have a proper conversation.
Because the reaction we hear again and again is the same:
“Why aren’t we doing this…what are we waiting for?”
And honestly?
I’ve been waiting a long time to say this - we don’t need towait anymore.
If this is already on your radar, now is the time to act. Get in touch with us today.
