If there was one prevailing sentiment across the seven panel discussions at AdLab 2025 this week, it was that healthcare marketing is at a genuine inflection point. The convergence of smarter data, faster platforms, and AI-powered tools has created more opportunity than ever to reach patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) in meaningful, measurable ways. But that opportunity brings a new mandate—move faster, think bigger, and build smarter. As Publicis Health Global CEO Matt McNally said, “It’s a magical time to be working in healthcare marketing.”
The optimism in the room was tempered by a sense of urgency. Marketers and agency leaders are navigating a landscape that demands personalization at scale, measurement that connects to real-world outcomes, and systems that reduce complexity rather than add to it. AI is already reshaping how teams work. Clean data and connected platforms are no longer aspirational. They’re essential.
What follows are five key takeaways that reflect the most actionable and thought-provoking themes from the day.
Healthcare marketers have long accepted fragmentation as a fact of life—but at AdLab 2025, that reality was reframed as a silent drain on performance. Fragmentation across data, workflows, and media channels isn’t just an operational nuisance. It’s a performance ceiling, a barrier to ad relevance, and a hidden cost that bleeds budget. “Our industry is sick with a bad case of fragmentation,” said DeepIntent CEO Chris Paquette in his keynote. “And nowhere is this impact felt more than in programmatic advertising, where time—from insight to action to impact—matters most.”
The story he shared painted a familiar picture: campaigns with multiple handoffs across vendors, delayed reporting, and wasted media spend while traders waited for quarterly decks to tell them what was (or wasn’t) working. “In the time between optimizations, our clients were wasting budget on underperforming placements… and very simply, they lost the dynamism needed to be agile,” he said. The takeaway? Fragmentation isn’t just a tech problem—it’s a business liability. And it’s time for healthcare marketers to demand tighter integrations, faster insights, and systems purpose-built for health.
In healthcare marketing, speed has traditionally been hampered by caution, compliance, and complexity. But AdLab highlighted a new paradigm: Health Intelligence™, which is the ability to detect, interpret, and act on market signals in real time. “Relevancy should be what we strive for,” according to SSCG’s SVP of Biddable Media, Michael Caruso. Health Intelligence enables brand-new relevancy thanks to its defining advantage of speed.
It isn’t just about technology. It’s about competitive advantage. Because the limiting factor for most data-driven campaigns isn’t the data; it’s the latency in optimization. With platforms now optimized for real-time learning and execution, the companies that can connect insights to actions the fastest will win.
As Kate Gattuso-Duffy, Pfizer’s Global Lead of Media Measurement, Web Optimization, and Analytics, said, “There’s nothing better than seeing a report and saying, ‘We increased our new patient starts by X amount, and that helped us do X more things with the dollars and grow that incrementality.’ To me, that’s really exciting—that speed to market, that speed to improvement and personalization and relevancy, so that we can ultimately improve those outcomes.”
Speed translates into greater relevancy and personalization, less wasted spend, and improved outcomes for patients and providers alike. The challenge is no longer access to data—it’s adopting the systems and culture to use it fast enough.
There was a clear consensus at AdLab: artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t here to replace marketers—it’s here to liberate them. Panelists described AI as a co-pilot, taking on tedious and tactical tasks so human creativity can flourish. AI is also transforming collaboration across functions. Anton Yazovskiy, Chief Technology Officer at DeepIntent, described the need for “AI fluency” across every role: “AI skills at a certain level are not optional anymore.” From smarter media planning to automated reporting, teams are already seeing gains. As Alfred Whitehead, EVP of Applied Sciences at Klick Health, put it, AI lets you not just “do what you were doing faster”—it enables you to “do what you couldn’t do before.” The industry’s challenge now is to operationalize AI thoughtfully, ensuring teams have the skills, tools, and governance to harness its full potential.
While AI usage is ramping up across the industry, Melissa Gordon-Ring, Global President of IPG Mediabrands Health, maintains that every application should be infused with humanity. AI will enable us to deliver more personalized messages to healthcare audiences in the coming years. Gordon-Ring advises marketers to be mindful of “too much hyper-personalization” and to “build pauses and thoughtfulness into the models we’re creating.” This will ensure marketers remain empathetic to where patients are along their health journeys and how receptive they are to receiving messaging.
Connected TV (CTV) is no longer on the sidelines of healthcare media planning—it’s center stage. “As of right now, CTV wins,” said Alice Harmon, Director of Omnichannel Analytics and Strategy at Lundbeck. “We’re seeing higher engagement, lower CPMs, and better ROI compared to other video channels.” Jeff Collins, President of Advertising Sales, Marketing and Brand Partnerships at Fox Corporation, reinforced the shift, noting that advertisers increasingly want the best of both worlds: “I want my big scaled audiences in linear, but then I need to round that out with granular CTV targeting.”
What sets CTV apart isn’t just precision. It’s agility: “CTV has forced us to have conversations around flexibility and targetability, even in linear,” said Erin Nocito, Executive Director and Head of Global Media at Amgen. Measurement has matured, too, with clean rooms and HIPAA-compliant attribution models allowing for near real-time optimizations. As Kevin Kammeyer, Director of US Media Operations at Gilead, put it, “We have a lot more metrics in CTV, and we can act on them quickly.” The result? A more responsive, accountable, and data-rich approach to video that’s redefining what performance looks like in healthcare media.
While patient-centricity remains vital, many leaders at AdLab emphasized a strategic shift: doubling down on HCP engagement. “HCP is now where it starts,” said McNally of Publicis Health. “The role that a clinician plays in getting a patient on therapy is essential.” As more therapies become chronic, lifelong treatments, understanding and supporting the prescriber journey has never been more critical.
Panelists noted that today’s HCPs are digital natives who expect the same personalization and relevance as consumers—“a 180 from where we were,” said Mark Pappas, EVP of Innovation at CMI Media Group. “Now it’s every possible social platform.” Gordon-Ring of IPG Mediabrands added that HCP marketing must also reflect the evolving demographics of providers. “The face of HCPs is becoming more female and more diverse. When patients see themselves in their physicians, we’ve seen better outcomes.” From messaging to media to measurement, HCP campaigns are being reimagined not as a niche effort but as a foundational driver of brand success.
And while it’s important to reach physicians in their “blue jeans” moments, there is a tremendous opportunity to incorporate programmatic at the bottom of the funnel. According to Damon Basch, Vice President and Head of Digital Health Media at Veradigm, “As programmatic buyers, we’re really good at the top of the funnel and mid funnel—building awareness at scale.” However, there’s a gap at the levels where patients and physicians interact. “My anecdotal data tells me that about 1-2% of programmatic spend is going into point of care. Where does 100% of conversion come from? Point of care.”
AdLab 2025 made it clear: the healthcare marketing industry isn’t playing catch-up anymore. It’s leading. The conversations have matured. The tools have evolved. And the leaders in the room were focused not just on what’s possible, but on what’s practical—and what’s next.
Success now depends on integration over silos, speed over lags, and creativity amplified by AI. It depends on meeting both people in the provider-patient dyad where they are. And most importantly, it depends on marketers recognizing their role not just as communicators, but as connectors—between insights and action, between platforms and people, and between innovation and real-world impact.
This is a defining moment. And the marketers who rise to meet it have a powerful opportunity: to make healthcare more accessible, more relevant, and more responsive to the people it serves.