This June, I have the privilege of serving on the Advertising & Marketing Effectiveness (AME) Awards Grand Jury – part of the New York Festivals annual awards program – where I’ll be shortlisting creative work that delivers real results. With that in mind, it feels timely to reflect on what drives effectiveness in the category I work in every day – healthcare.
This article looks specifically at advertising effectiveness in pharmaceutical marketing. In another article, I’ll look more closely at the advertising of healthcare services.
In Australia, the regulations governing pharmaceutical advertising are much tighter and more restrictive than countries like the US and even our close neighbour, New Zealand. With direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines prohibited, pharmaceutical marketers are limited to targeting a highly informed but time-poor audience: healthcare professionals. Trade advertising remains one of the most effective promotional channels for reaching clinicians. But cutting through the noise requires more than a flashy graphic or medical jargon.
So, what makes a pharmaceutical advert effective?
Healthcare professionals rely heavily on evidence-based information to guide day-to-day clinical decision-making. Promotional claims must be supported by robust scientific data. Pharmaceutical marketers know how important it is to anchor a claim in its supporting evidence, but this becomes even more critical if your advert relies heavily on a highly creative concept to convey key messaging. Conceptual thinking is great for getting a product ad noticed in a busy medium but will only truly earn your brand consideration if it’s grounded in credible, data-driven evidence. Otherwise, it’s just an attention-grabbing idea – not a persuasive, clinically relevant message.
Time is a precious commodity in a clinician’s day. Your message must get to the point – fast. Think ‘one ad, one message’. Focus on conveying one single-minded message; if you try and get multiple messages across in the same ad, you’ll risk all the messages being diluted or lost. Prioritise the message that best aligns with the current clinical gap – the outcome/s related to this imperative will represent what matters most to clinicians.
Depending on the drug and therapeutic context, this may involve new data points related to improved efficacy, safety and adherence, particularly in a switch setting. But if it’s a medicine typically used in the acute hospital setting (e.g. as part of ICU, surgical or oncology protocols), communicating the health economic benefits can also be important, such as resource savings related to faster onset of action, ease of use (e.g. subcutaneous versus intravenous administration) and reduced length of stay. Importantly, scientific data will only be compelling if you can show how it relates to positive clinical outcomes – e.g. a drug with a novel mode of action is irrelevant unless it moves the dial on one or more clinical outcomes.
An oncologist and a GP won’t engage with the same content. Nor will a hospital-based pharmacist and one working in community practice. Your advertising needs to reflect a nuanced understanding of specialty-specific concerns, clinical environments and patient populations. Being able to understand these different clinical contexts is not something all creative agencies share – important clinical nuances can be overlooked by generic messaging that fails to speak directly to each audience’s day-to-day reality. When creative work doesn’t reflect the pressures, priorities and language of a particular clinical setting, it risks being ignored – or worse, dismissed as irrelevant. Effective healthcare advertising must go beyond surface-level segmentation and demonstrate a deep, working knowledge of how different HCPs think, work and make decisions.
Clinicians are visual thinkers – but not in the same way consumers are. A well-designed ad for healthcare professionals should guide the eye to critical content, not overwhelm it. But don’t make the mistake of assuming that functional visuals will always do the job – they can be easily overlooked, particularly if the data is nuanced and literal interpretation doesn’t tell the whole story. In the right messaging context, a well-conceived creative concept can garner attention, memorability and recall where scientific data alone could not.
Effective healthcare advertising in trade media rarely exists in isolation. When part of an omnichannel approach incorporating other messaging vehicles such as educational content, direct mail, email marketing, a well thought-out conference presence and rep visits, the ad becomes part of a much broader engagement strategy. Multi-channel campaigns enable frequency of messaging via repeated exposure but these other channels also allow messaging to build, laddering secondary features and benefits.
In Australia, pharmaceutical advertising must comply with the Medicines Australia Code of Conduct and, where relevant, the TGA’s advertising guidelines. Non-compliance can lead to reputational damage and fines. Involving your medical and regulatory teams early in the creative process will ensure that your proposed promotional claims are permitted and that the creative work positions these claims in a compliant way.
In the world of Australian healthcare advertising, effectiveness comes down to credibility, clarity and clinical relevance. Trade media remains a vital channel for reaching clinicians, but success depends on deeply understanding the audience’s mindset, clinical challenges and informational needs. The best ads don’t just inform – they support better patient care.
Need help crafting a clinician-focused ad campaign? Let’s chat about how to turn your clinical data and brand value into compelling, compliant creative.
Dr Candice O’Sullivan,
Managing Director | Head of Strategy & Planning at Wellmark. You can follow Wellmark on Facebook @wellmarkcreative, LinkedIn @Wellmark_Pty_Ltd or Insta @wellmarkcreative.
