Pharmaceutical advertisers are caught in a vice: empowered patients want more information while regulators close in on traditional TV. Streaming, built on a different legal foundation than broadcast or cable, may be the only durable, defensible channel left.
We spoke to Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, a cross-channel TV advertising company with the self-serve CTV campaign platform Skybeam. He sees streaming as the safest channel for pharma advertising.
Immune to regulation: “The regulatory framework around media is an unbelievable patchwork quilt,” Morgan says. “Broadcast falls under the FCC, cable under the Communications Act, satellite has its own rules, and streaming is almost entirely carved out of all of it. No matter what happens, the streaming channel will be fully available for pharma advertising and will be virtually impossible for the government to regulate.”
That regulatory sprawl is shaping the future of TV advertising. For pharma brands targeting narrow patient populations, it makes reaching the right viewers even harder. Advertisers must stop thinking in silos and adopt a holistic, data-driven approach to find the right viewers.
Carrot con: The stakes are uniquely high because drug development is so expensive, making marketing efficiency a non-negotiable. This reality contrasts sharply with what Morgan calls the industry’s history of “dangling carrots”—dazzling promises about data-driven TV that rarely lead to great execution.
The problem is compounded by a streaming ad world where, he estimates, 30 to 40 percent of the money is simply lost to fraud. “It’s siphoned off by bad practices and intermediaries,” he states. “Maybe only 10 cents on the dollar actually gets to the content creator.”
Suppress to impress: Morgan’s fix is counterintuitive: don’t just target better, target less. “The most important thing we can do is suppress ads to the people who aren’t interested,” he says. “No one watching TV thinks the ads respect them. We need to fall in love with our customer’s problems, and right now, their problem is a firehose of irrelevant ads.”
Handle with care: That data-driven strategy comes with a critical warning. Citing the industry’s history of “weaponizing” consumer information, Morgan is adamant that privacy must come first. “You’ve got to be really careful,” he says. “It’s a third-rail issue to be dealing with people’s health data. We have to build privacy by design into what we do.”
Proof in the prescription: The antidote to empty promises and ad fraud is a closed-loop system that ties ad exposure directly to anonymized prescription data. The goal isn’t just reach, it’s results. “The question we have to answer is, ‘How did our campaign actually work against real prescription data, on an anonymized basis?'” Morgan says. “Did we reach the right people? That’s how you move past carrots and start delivering real, needed solids.”
A TV renaissance: Such a shift doesn’t mean a return to dominance for broadcast or cable, which Morgan believes will continue to decline. Instead, he envisions a renaissance for the holistic TV experience, where the large screen in the home becomes more valuable and impactful through fewer, more relevant ads. “Ideally, consumers would be saying, ‘Wow, I actually got some pharma ads that mattered to me,'” he says. “It’s about elevating the good and eliminating the worst.”
