In a vibrant session at AdLab 2025, a panel of industry leaders explored how endemic publishers are adapting to a rapidly evolving programmatic landscape. The discussion featured Damon Basch, VP and Head of Digital Media at Veradigm; Tom Carr, SVP of Media and Data Strategy at Everyday Health; Francis D’Hondt, SVP of Addressable Health at KINESSO; and Ray Rosti, President of Klick Media.
Moderated by DeepIntent SVP of Strategy Carrie Craigmyle, the panel tackled key questions around trust, data interoperability, and how the industry is navigating the shift toward omnichannel planning. Here are the five top takeaways.
The panel made it clear that, for endemic publishers, programmatic is no longer an add-on or a down-the-road consideration—it’s a must. Once hesitant to enter the programmatic space, endemic publishers are now actively embracing it to align with advertiser and industry expectations. “Our job is to be where the demand is and to allow marketers to buy the way they want to buy,” said Veradigm’s Damon Basch. “We’ve stepped into it.”
Publishers are seeing that their specialized environments and high-intent audiences are highly valuable in the programmatic ecosystem. Francis D’Hondt of Kinesso shared that, as recently as a few years ago, publishers like Veradigm wouldn’t feature in his team’s media mix. But he stressed that they represent “a really good opportunity. I view it as a chance to diversify a lot of the media plans that we have, test out some new partners, and expand to different channels. It’s something that I hope spurs a lot more innovation… It’s exciting.”
Panelists frequently returned to the same structural hurdle: education. They stressed that too many people still don’t understand how programmatic works, much less how endemic fits into it. Tom Carr of Everyday Health described the imperative of shifting away from a direct-sell culture. “Traditional sellers may look at programmatic, sometimes, as the enemy,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s an and, not an or.”
D’Hondt discussed the need for education on the agency side, too. There are still a lot of cases where direct and programmatic teams are duplicating work or briefing partners separately. “I think it’s really imperative that we’re all thinking about this from a holistic media plan perspective,” he said. Education must happen across the board, for sales teams, agencies, and clients alike.
One major insight from the panel was the growing role of POC advertising, such as electronic health records (EHR), in the programmatic conversation. Basch pointed out that, in the past, POC was a managed-service business, but that is changing. Programmatic buyers have started saying, “we’re really good at top-of-funnel and mid-funnel, and we’re really good at building awareness at scale and optimizing and working with data, but then there’s a gap because the patient and the physician start to come to a point of communion at a clinic or a pharmacy, and we’re not there.”
This gap in the journey can be costly. “All the investment and strategy at the top of the funnel and mid-funnel leads to leakage if you’re not there at the bottom…where there’s so much clinical decisioning going on,” he said. “My anecdotal data tells me that about 1%, maybe 2% of programmatic spend is going into point of care. Where does 100% of conversion come from? Point of care.”
Even as programmatic grows, the panelists emphasized that endemic publishers offer something uniquely valuable that cannot be replaced by automation: trust. Carrie Craigmyle framed the discussion by reminding the audience that “at the heart of effective healthcare marketing is trust,” and endemic publishers play a vital role in establishing that trust through high-quality, medically grounded content.
Klick’s Ray Rosti stressed that endemic placements are more than just good media. They’re meaningful data signals. “Endemic is a data signal. Contextual adjacency is a data signal. Engaging in an EHR is a data signal,” he said, adding that what excites him the most is marrying the ability to broadly target in non-endemic moments at the top of the funnel with the precision of endemic environments. As Carr affirmed, “Endemic is not dead. Great content will drive those strong signals,” and strong signals drive performance.
Agencies are facing growing pressure to deliver consistent, actionable, and timely data to their clients. But many endemic partners are still lagging behind in data interoperability, creating friction in planning and reporting. Rosti shared that clients are sometimes dissatisfied because it’s not easy for his team to “pass back” data in the format they expect, on account of how their data partner might share it. Sometimes, this can challenge an agency team’s relationship with a data partner. “I think what we’re all yearning for is to make it easier to work with [a partner], make it easier to get on the plan, find a way to make that data pass-back super easy for us.”
Basch noted that, “We pass the NPI information back to DeepIntent, and all that harmonization, all that optimization gets funneled through their tool. And so it takes a lot of the burden off of us to deliver that physician-level data, that pass-back.” For endemic partners who want to win programmatic dollars, seamless data integration is non-negotiable.
Endemic publishers continue to play a central role in the healthcare marketing ecosystem, offering the trust, context, and audience intent that advertisers depend on. But the entire industry must adapt to meet evolving expectations around omnichannel planning and data interoperability. Success will come from prioritizing education, broader collaboration, and staying focused on improving health outcomes.