Pharma marketers are under more pressure than ever. The market for new treatments is more competitive. Medicine is becoming more personalized, which means the audience for new treatments needs to be more clearly defined. Campaign cycles are shorter. The cost of treatment development continues to rise, often running to billions of dollars, with many failing to make it to market. The margin for strategic error is shrinking.
The promise of data-driven advertising and AI to solve these challenges can feel like a timely silver bullet. After all, there is arguably no market more suited to the power of data and precision than pharma, where high-value products are aimed at very specific audiences. And if we can solve these challenges, the payoff is significant: More new treatments coming to market, that can improve and extend the lives for those suffering with conditions that might not otherwise get pharma research or commercial attention.
Why the AI Hype Hasn't Delivered
But until now, AI hasn’t lived up to the hype. That’s because many of the AI tools flooding the healthcare marketing space today are built on generic, public-internet data — optimized for the most common denominator of use cases, not for the nuanced, high-stakes world of pharmaceutical advertising. They are layering AI on top of whatever data happened to be available, regardless of quality. They are using general-purpose AI modeling to plan nuanced pharma campaigns. In healthcare marketing, confidently wrong decisions at scale are not just inefficient—they can be devastating.
DeepIntent's approach has been deliberate where others have been opportunistic. DeepIntent has spent years curating a vast, HIPAA-compliant dataset—all anonymized, but rich with information about advertising exposure and response, healthcare system interactions, and prescriptions written. Data covering 3.7 million healthcare professionals and 240 million patient lives (and the many ways they have interacted with treatment advertising over many years), is what powers DeepIntent Helix™, the industry's most trusted and comprehensive health advertising data cloud.
Helix AI is the intelligence layer on top of Helix. It enables pharma marketers to model how markets are likely to respond to new treatments, identify the right HCP and patient targets, and design audiences and campaigns with clinical relevance built in from very outset of strategic planning.
It is built for the modern healthcare marketer. Rather than asking marketers to learn yet another platform or dashboard requiring manual data pulls and analyst hours, marketers can now query complex HCP and patient data in plain language and get answers in seconds. Instead of building audiences through clunky filters, they can shape segments through natural conversation and activate them immediately, across all platforms, not just programmatic. Instead of spending weeks moving from brief to tactical plan, teams can go from question to insight to execution inside a single chat session.
A Different Kind of Speed
Among beta users, Helix AI clients are seeing an 8x improvement in audience analysis speed and a 50% reduction in planning cycle time. This represents a significant advance in strategic velocity and performance.
"DeepIntent has long been a trusted partner in helping us unlock the full potential of health data,” said Sharona Sankar-King, Chief Data and Product Officer of Havas Media Network North America. “Helix AI represents a meaningful leap forward in how quickly we can understand market dynamics, identify opportunities, and bring stronger recommendations to clients. The speed at which we can now surface actionable insights has fundamentally changed how we approach strategy and new business.”
Helix AI represents a major advance in how healthcare marketers strategize, plan and execute cross-platform marketing campaigns. It dramatically collapses the planning timeframe and improves audience relevance and performance. It’s not simply about buying the right ad impression. It’s about developing the right marketing approach for essential, high-value products—all the way from strategic planning to execution and optimization. All while increasingly both velocity and performance.
With Helix AI, the marketer isn’t sidelined. They are more strategic, more valuable, and more essential than ever to the success of treatments that save and improve lives.
