The rapidly evolving digital advertising landscape is forcing healthcare agencies to rethink their strategies for long-term success. Agencies should be connecting the dots from planning and activation to measurement and optimization; utilizing first-party data for identity and measurement in the wake of third-party cookie deprecation; and identifying top talent to help accelerate the path to success.
With RFP season right around the corner, these steps are pivotal as they begin developing their strategies for 2023.
Healthcare Agencies Need to Invest in People for Long-Term Success
The technology landscape is evolving every single day. Healthcare agencies must ensure they have people on their teams who understand these developments and drive change. Though the insights and industry wisdom from veteran employees remain valuable, agencies should make investments – both in time and monetarily – to ensure that they have a healthy mix of people with varying experience levels, backgrounds, and talents that can contribute to creating a more dynamic agency.
Investing in talent and training existing employees, especially those closest to the business, presents numerous benefits. Additionally, healthcare agencies benefit from hiring outside the organization and gaining greater diversity of thought, especially around technology and data. It’s a balancing act, but it helps ensure diverse perspectives at the table.
The Importance of Connecting the Dots to Design a Successful Campaign
When planning a digital advertising campaign, it’s crucial to take every step of the process into account. In order to design and execute more effective, holistic campaigns, media buyers must connect the dots at every juncture – from planning to activation to measurement and optimization.
Of course, healthcare agency departments responsible for planning, analytics, buying, and more already use data to make decisions. However, they aren’t necessarily using the same platforms to collect and assess their data. For instance, the analytics department may uncover an important trend across campaigns. But if their peers handling buying decisions aren’t aware or don’t have access to that analysis, what good is it?
Healthcare agencies can connect these dots by limiting silos and encouraging coordination and alignment at every stage.
Something that can help connect these dots is utilizing data at all stages of the campaign to perform real-time analysis and optimization. Is the data indicating that the campaign is not on track to reach results? The agency then has the opportunity to shift the strategy or to better align with the desired outcomes. This is key for being more data-driven, efficient, and prepared for a cookieless future.
How First-Party Data and CTV Will Be Key to the Cookieless Transition
With Google removing third-party cookies in 2024, a big industry focus will be identity resolution and how to be more holistic in approaches to identification. It’s imperative to find innovative ways to harness privacy-compliant identity information to track and accurately measure audience engagement for campaigns. In addition, healthcare agencies would be wise to begin testing cookieless approaches and leaning into new, innovative methods of identification and measurement before this looming deadline hits.
For many, this means relying more on first-party data and alternative methods of identification, as well as exploring channels that don’t rely on cookies – such as connected TV (CTV). Cookieless by design, CTV presents valuable opportunities related to identity resolution. The rapid shift to this channel over the past few years highlights the success of these methods.
A recent DeepIntent report revealed that CTV devices are currently present in 85% of households. Household IDs, alongside automatic content recognition (ACR) data, which captures and interprets audio and video clips, provide a more comprehensive picture of what content is being consumed on a given connected device. Sans cookies, these tools will continue to prove their value in measuring campaign success and gathering useful consumer data.
To learn more about how patients feel about pharma ads on CTV, click here to download our research report, Seeing TV Differently: Patient Views During the CTV Renaissance.