As the holiday season gets underway, pharma marketers may be feeling more frenzied than festive.
Medicare open enrollment and end-of-year deductible spending are prompting some brands to ramp up TV ad spend during Q4. Yet they're fiercely competing with each other, along with other categories, for premium inventory this time of year. Meanwhile, pharma brands face headwinds like a changing regulatory environment that affects what can be said in their ads and how results can be tracked.
Instead of waiting months for MMM reports or script lift results, pharma marketers can use mid-funnel outcomes data to gain speedy, trustworthy visibility into campaigns. That enables brands to adjust their strategies more quickly, driving more value from the same — or even lower — total ad spend.
EDO uses incremental, ad-driven lift in consumer behaviors like brand searches and website visits to measure ad effectiveness, without requiring patient data. Our analysis of pharma ad performance across linear and streaming TV points to three ways pharma marketers can get more out of their end-of-year ad spend:
Invest in High-Impact Environments
Considering cost generally rises with impressions, you want to make sure that any premium investments deliver results.
What's encouraging, though, is that live sports broadly live up to the hype, with Pharma ads during these games driving 2.7x more impact (a combination of engagement + reach) on average than the primetime benchmark.
In particular, these brands seem to pair well with football. On average, Pharma ads during NFL regular-season games last year were 95% more effective than the category’s primetime benchmark. Plus, three of the league's top five most effective advertisers last season were Pharma brands.
Balance Storytelling and Scale
In addition to picking where to run ads, pharma marketers should reconsider which creatives they run based on their specific goals. In many cases, finding a balance between brand storytelling and educational messaging about particular products leads to the best overall results.
For instance, brand storytelling ads are more effective at building trust and brand recall, which can help advertisers that are focused primarily on long-term growth that can generate higher customer retention and conversion rates moving forward.
For those looking for faster results, educational messaging tends to drive more immediate action and engagement, which could help brands trying to hit end-of-year goals. The tradeoff, though, is that sustained success might require high levels of investment in the future, especially as new drugs come to market.
Optimize Creative Length by Environment
Pharma marketers should think beyond just the cost of running shorter vs. longer ads. Different lengths can serve different purposes, and to get the most out of each spot, it helps to understand which environments correlate with better performance.
From a pure efficiency perspective, 15-second spots provide the optimal dosage. These are 315% more effective than the category average — but shorter spots won't work for every context. If you're focused more on brand trust to gain market share in a highly competitive category, for example, a longer creative might be more effective.
If you do run longer ads, consider lean-in environments like live sports, where engaged viewers might be more tuned in for the full ad duration. A 30-second spot in that environment provides 77% stronger engagement for Pharma brands than the category average.
In other contexts, like launching a new prescription drug with lengthy side effect disclosures, a 75-second spot may make more sense. Being able to analyze what works for your competitors and within your own campaigns can help you find programming where the extra air time makes sense.
Find the Right Treatment With EDO
Instead of guessing at what works or doing a postmortem months later, you can optimize campaigns quickly with EDO. We measure every ad that airs across convergent TV, looking at the outcomes that reflect what people do — like search queries, site visits, and app downloads — not what they say they’ll do.
These actions are proven predictors of purchase intent. To start getting more out of your ad spend before the year comes to an end, book a meeting today.