The pharmaceutical industry has long favored broadcast television. In fact, linear TV accounted for more than 70% of last year’s ad spend. That’s because linear TV campaigns work for the industry. Pharma advertisers need sight, sound, and motion. They need 60-second ad spots in order to include all the necessary regulatory information. But when it comes to campaign measurement, linear TV is not always best.
Prior to joining the DeepIntent team, I spent more than 20 years on the agency side. I remember measuring pharma ad campaigns being a long, laborious process. We’d typically receive reports months later.
Many times, the campaign was already over. This made it difficult to tell the client what was working and what was not.
Maximizing Addressable Media
Addressable media makes that infinitely easier (and faster). One top pharmaceutical company invests heavily in addressable media to support its largest brand, an antiviral medication used to treat symptoms of an infectious disease. As the pharmaceutical company’s agency of record, Matterkind was committed to maximizing its addressable media investment and proving its efficacy in driving business results: total script performance (TRx) and new prescription starts.
We collaborated with Matterkind on an integrated, multi-channel campaign focused on three addressable channels: display video, online video, and connected TV (CTV). From there, our script performance algorithm optimized media in real-time to improve prescription metrics while reducing cost-per-script.
What Measuring Pharma Ad Campaigns Tells Us About CTV
CTV has been growing in popularity for years, with the pandemic only accelerating its adoption. According to The Diffusion Group, there are currently 38 million broadband-only homes in the U.S., a number that is projected to rise 42% to 54 million by 2026.
From a linear TV perspective, those audiences are gone. However, CTV is a great reach extender for any brand’s television strategy. We’ve found that CTV campaigns deliver 10 to 30% incremental reach to patients who can’t be reached on linear TV, depending on the condition.
Measuring pharma ad campaigns, we frequently see CTV outperforming other digital channels. Matterkind’s campaign was no different.
CTV delivered 2X higher NBRx (new-to-brand prescriptions) than online video and 2.5X higher NBRx than display.
However, the best results came from all three channels working together in tandem. Combined exposure to all three channels delivered 6X the NBRx rate vs. standalone display.
Download the case study to learn:
- How HCPs’ prescribing rates improved by 10%.
- Why patients were 225% more likely to get on script.
- How NBRx increased by 12X while cost-per-script decreased by 60%.
- And more!