In this episode of Deep: The Health Marketing Podcast, healthcare marketing leader John Mangano sits down with Jameson Fleming, Editor in Chief of MM+M, to explore how his journey from sports journalism to pharma media informs his perspective on health advertising. Drawing from his experience at CBS Sports, Adweek, and now MM+M, Jameson shares his audience-first approach and emphasizes the need for human-centered storytelling in pharma marketing.
The conversation covers the industry's creative constraints and why they're no reason for uninspired work. Jameson discusses the importance of integrating more outside thinking into the industry, the missed opportunity of patient-led narratives, and how pharma can better tap into trends like social listening and connected TV (CTV) to improve reach and resonance.
Jameson also offers candid views on drug pricing transparency, the future of direct-to-consumer advertising, and his vision for evolving MM+M into a daily go-to resource. His message to both pharma marketers and legislators is clear: innovation, education, and openness are the keys to building trust and delivering better outcomes.
Transcript:
John Mangano (JM): Hello and welcome to Deep, the health marketing podcast. I'm here with Jameson Fleming, the editor-in-chief of MM+M. Welcome, Jameson.
Jameson Fleming (JF): Thank you for having me — excited to do this.
JM: Jameson, you come to pharma with a really interesting background. Before MM+M, you were at Adweek for quite a while, and before that, at Bleacher Report. Tell me about the path that got you here.
JF: It was definitely an unexpected road for me. I went to school at Syracuse, at the Newhouse School — I wanted to be on ESPN, but that just wasn't in the cards. I worked for Bleacher Report during college, back before it sold to Turner for $200 million, so I was there when it was still a pretty scrappy organization, covering college basketball. That got me my first real job out of college, at CBS Sports, as one of their two original social media editors. My coworker and I basically built the strategy for reaching a sports audience on social — very audience-first, and we grew followings into the seven figures across multiple platforms.
From there I moved to a local newspaper, worked in audience development for a couple of years, and then landed at Adweek, where I spent about eight and a half years doing audience-first work across social, newsletters, and eventually editorial coverage of brand marketing and, later, creative work as well. My entire career has really been about figuring out what audiences want and delivering it — which is essentially my remit at MM+M too: figuring out what a digital audience wants from us and giving them that. That perspective definitely shapes how I think about pharma marketers having a real opportunity to understand what their audience is doing, saying, and where they actually are, and reaching them with the right message there.
JM: It's funny — you're the first practicing journalist we've had on the show, though we've had plenty of former journalists who now work in pharma. It seems like the drive to tell a real story about patients is something everyone in this industry has in common — you're just lucky enough to still be doing it as a journalist. Exciting to have you here.
JF: Exactly. Something I've always told my reporters is that, at the end of the day, we're telling stories about business, pharma, marketing — but people are always at the center of it. I always encourage reporters and editors to make the opening of a story as personal as possible, because it pulls the reader in and makes the story feel real and important once you can actually see how a topic is affecting someone specifically, or what role someone plays in it.
JM: Nothing impacts people more than healthcare and their wellbeing, so I'm sure you have plenty to work with there.
JF: Absolutely.
JM: You have a great vantage point on the diversity of marketing as a whole, compared to what we do specifically in pharma. What stands out most to you about the differences?
JF: Great question. For me, the biggest difference is just the rules this industry has to operate within. I came from covering general marketing, consumer-led agencies, where the sky's the limit on ideas — pretty much any idea can be executed if there's a will. You see these magnificent, almost unbelievable creative concepts, and you think, how did anyone even come up with that, let alone convince the client to greenlight it? Then you get into this industry, and the rules are very clearly defined. You've got a box you can operate in — you can poke at the edges, work around the dimensions a little — but for the most part, you know your constraints, and you have to find genuinely creative ways to execute your mission, which is reaching people and pushing health solutions that either improve or save lives.
JM: Do you think that difference ends up being a detriment to patients, or do we ultimately find a way and still achieve the outcomes we need — getting patients the help they need?
JF: Honestly, in my first six months in this industry, it did seem like a detriment at first. But at the end of the day, pharma brands and biotech firms, pushing one health solution or another, seem pretty successful at it. We see success story after success story — expanded patient pools, blockbuster drug launch after blockbuster drug launch. Something is clearly working, and I think it comes down to how well-trained people in this industry are at finding a solution within the constraints.
Where I think there's room for improvement is that there's such a strong preference to constantly hire people who already know health and know the rules — you don't see as many hires coming from outside health, bringing in fresh thinking. Every once in a while I'll talk to an agency that says that's exactly what they try to do, but for the most part, it's a lot of hiring people who already know the industry and turning them into lifers. I think there's room for more outside, fresh thinking, though I understand the need to balance that against people who genuinely understand the industry's constraints.
JM: That's a good point. We all fall into habits — dare I say ruts — doing things the way we've always done them, using "the box we're in" as an excuse rather than actually pushing against it. What are you seeing outside of pharma that makes you think, "God, we could be doing that — we should be doing that"?
JF: I think pharma actually has the biggest advantage of almost any category: every single product you're advertising, whether it's a drug or a new insulin dispenser, impacts people on a deeply personal level — it can change lives, improve them, even save them. That storytelling element doesn't show up in pharma advertising as much as it could. In consumer advertising, some products create a genuinely deep emotional connection, but rarely to the extent that exists in health.
Look at this year's Super Bowl — Pfizer's ad was dramatically better year over year. Last year, they focused on celebrating oncology successes with an ad that wasn't personalized at all — great song, "Love, Queens" — but otherwise it fell flat for a lot of people, and it landed toward the bottom of USA Today's ad rankings. People were frustrated to see pharma advertising during the Super Bowl at all.
This year, they focused on a real story, a real kid, and showed his triumph over cancer, and it resonated extremely well. Were there still complaints about pharma advertising during the Super Bowl and spending all that money? Yes. Were there groups pointing out that Pfizer could be doing even more for childhood cancer specifically? Yes. But at the end of the day, it spoke to the audience so effectively that the relatively small amount of criticism was outweighed by the overall success of the ad.
JM: When it comes to public perception of pharma ads — and there's always a lot of debate about whether pharma should even be advertising — what do you think the industry could benefit from changing?
JF: Coming in from the outside, I had my own questions about how I'd want to cover this industry — including questioning the whole premise of pharma advertising drugs directly to consumers at all, since the US is one of only two countries in the world that allows it. The longer I've been in it, though, the more I've come to see the real value. A lot of it comes down to actually seeing these drugs change lives and educate consumers. I think the best advertising does a genuinely great job educating people about conditions.
Since I've started paying much closer attention, I've seen ads that make me think about my own health and go, "I might actually bring that up with my doctor," because I've experienced some of what's described, and the ad did such a good job educating me on what to look out for that it prompted an actual conversation. Not every ad on TV does that — but the best ones do a phenomenal job raising awareness of conditions that aren't household names. There are plenty of conditions the average person already knows about, but there are so many others people don't, and I think the best advertising makes people realize those conditions are more common than they'd assume.
JM: There's a lot of brand-level awareness people just don't connect to a specific condition. Unless you're a healthcare provider, or know someone with the condition, or have it yourself, you likely wouldn't know much about most of these conditions at all. Everyone knows about things like RA, and hopefully it'll never touch them personally, but those who are affected really appreciate getting that message.
JF: Absolutely.
JM: You've been at MM+M for six months now. Where do you think we, as an industry and as marketers, should focus to generate more excitement in pharma?
JF: I just want to see more breakthrough creative shared more widely. One of the most eye-opening things for me when I joined was covering the MM+M Awards, about six weeks into my tenure. I was editing stories about all these winners — such great creative, amazing ideas — and as I went to add supporting links or case studies, I realized we hadn't actually covered most of this work beforehand. It's because a lot of this creative doesn't reach journalists until award submissions come in — it just doesn't get pitched to us otherwise.
The perspective I bring from my Adweek days is that we actively celebrated great creative — we sought it out, wrote about it, tried to tell the inside story as best we could. I want to bring more of that to MM+M, so people feel genuinely inspired coming to us daily, because there's so much this industry can do, and is doing, but it lives in silos, quietly out in the world, without getting talked about nearly as much as it should. I think that requires a real cultural shift, both from agencies and their clients. What I tell pharma brands is: give us more insight into this work, send it to us, let us write about it and highlight it when it's good. At the end of the day, the mission across this whole industry is the same — improving and saving lives. Yes, you're also trying to grow drug sales, but everyone's ultimately working toward the same goal, so there should be a collective push to showcase great work more widely and inspire even better work overall.
JM: It's interesting — in non-health advertising, the marketing that moves us most is often adjacent to the actual product itself, like the story of an athlete sponsored by a shoe company overcoming personal challenges — you see this constantly around the Olympics, and it's always incredibly well received. In pharma, I'd argue every product has probably a thousand genuinely moving stories about how someone's life was changed, how they got more time with their kids — this industry is driving so many powerful stories, but we just don't talk about them nearly enough.
JF: It's a shame. I think about the holiday advertising Montefiore's hospital system has done the past few years — consistently incredible craft, incredible storytelling. That's the kind of work that sticks with me, even as someone who covers this industry professionally, because it's so compelling to see someone's real story brought to life in a way that anyone who's been through something similar, or is about to go through it, can genuinely relate to. That's just so powerful.
JM: You mentioned having ideas for industry leaders about how to change things. Assuming some of them are listening right now, what would be your top three challenges for them in the coming years?
JF: Great question. The first, the obvious one I've already touched on, is: put patients front and center in your work more. The second is spending more time actively finding where people are already engaging. A lot of pharma brands already do this reasonably well, but I've talked to several people over the past month or so about social listening specifically — organically joining conversations where people already are, and actually helping them. Some of these patient forums out there are incredibly powerful, largely because of the trust people have in others going through the same experience — it comes down to people and their own stories. I'd challenge these brands to listen to those forums even more than they currently do.
For the third, I'm not entirely sure of the exact answer, but I think it has to be somewhere around price transparency. Going back to what happened outside that hotel in December, with the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO — there's a lot of pent-up anger around insurance and drug pricing right now. This industry probably needs to be more transparent about why drug prices are what they are, and communicate the full picture of a drug's life cycle to consumers, helping people understand how we got here and how we might address it. I'd assume most pharma brands would charge less if they could, but they still need to stay profitable and keep shareholders satisfied. It's a genuinely difficult challenge for the industry, but there needs to be movement in that direction, because trust in the industry keeps eroding as the American healthcare system remains so expensive.
JM: When you look at the challenge of educating the public on the various health conditions we market — and I think the industry has actually gotten quite good at that; it wasn't nearly this good when I started — it raises the question of whether we could do the same kind of education around something even more complex: what actually makes a drug cost what it costs, and how pricing works overall. I remember, back in 2020, during the pandemic, there was suddenly a lot of faith placed in pharma — vaccines and treatments were coming out, and everyone was looking to the industry for a solution, which genuinely improved public perception of pharma at that moment, largely because we all needed one. That feels like ages ago now, thankfully, and people are focused on everything else going on in the world — there's a lot. Now it's more, "We're just trying to pay our bills, and we kind of expect these solutions to exist." Maybe we need a reminder of just how fortunate we are to have an industry supporting us this way.
JF: Right — I think we're at a real tipping point where people want change, and pharma actually has an opportunity to help drive it, since there are other factors in the broader healthcare system contributing more to high prices than pharma's role alone. Pharma has a real chance to make a difference here. However this plays out with the Trump administration and the IRA drug-price negotiations, I think it's a bad look for pharma right now if they push back too hard. The drugs on that negotiation list — companies need to work constructively with the administration on pricing, or the industry risks losing even more public trust than it already has.
JM: You mentioned change, and there's a lot happening in advertising right now — not necessarily the messaging itself, but the media landscape, with CTV and other new environments emerging, plus how marketing itself gets done, one-to-one messaging, and so on. What do you see as the top three changes happening right now, and how should pharma embrace, adapt to, or leverage them?
JF: The first is audience fragmentation. Everyone lives in their own silo now — this is really a broader societal issue we all have to figure out, since everyone's fed what their algorithm thinks they want, and you rarely see other perspectives. This isn't really a "pharma" problem specifically, since I don't know how any single industry solves that — but because of media fragmentation, everyone lives in their own bubble shaped by an algorithm, unless you're someone who still deliberately seeks out and visits specific websites directly. Pharma has an opportunity, though: whenever someone signals they're entering their particular "bubble" of relevance, brands need to be ready with the right message for that person.
The second is something you already mentioned — CTV. We actually just ran a story in our most recent issue about pharma's continued relationship with linear TV, and it's a bit surprising how much money pharma still spends on linear, when connected TV gives you a far better sense of your actual audience, and a better shot at driving real interaction through all the interactive ad formats available on CTV now. A lot of other categories have already made that shift, but pharma is still very committed to linear TV, which genuinely surprises me — I think that's a huge opportunity, or point of change, pharma could pursue. I'm trying to think if I have a strong third one off the top of my head — but those are probably the two biggest.
JM: On CTV — I think of it in two parts. First, I basically just think of CTV as "TV" now. I'm old enough to remember when internet marketing was brand new, and "online" versus "offline" advertising were treated as entirely separate departments — now it's just one marketing department doing marketing. I think, in the not-too-distant future, with CTV, people will just go back to calling it "TV" again, with maybe a small holdout still on linear. CTV feels inevitable, simply because everyone eventually replaces their TV with a smart one. Or do you think linear TV has real staying power?
JF: I think it's inevitable — you can see the shift happening every year. There'll probably still be some small segment on linear for the next 10 or 15 years, but it'll keep shrinking annually. For the most part, CTV is the future — the real question is which version of CTV wins out. Some streaming platforms are already fairly mature with interactive ad products, ads that show multiple messages, or just look genuinely different from a standard 30-second linear TV spot, while some other streaming services still just run 90 seconds of fairly typical advertising. I think the biggest open question is really about how much consumers want to engage with their phone in hand while watching, and how much they actually want to interact with ads on their TV directly.
JM: That was my second point — interactivity. Where do you see the industry heading in terms of getting people to interact more, and how does the kind of interaction people want around health differ from other categories? Some health topics are just deeply private, and people may not want to interact at all. How does the industry embrace interactivity while still getting the most value out of it?
JF: Great question. Ultimately, I think the opportunity is education. If a consumer is watching something and an ad genuinely resonates with them, there are really two paths: they pick up their phone and search for it directly in a browser, or, if the TV supports it, they click "okay" with their Roku remote to have information sent to their email, or scan a QR code. Either way, it comes down to those two paths — can you get someone to actually search for something in the moment? You see this a lot with Amazon's advertising benchmarks — you saw an ad for Tide during an NFL broadcast, and searches for Tide Pods spiked 180% in the next two minutes, and that becomes measurable. Because measurement through CTV will keep getting so much better, I think marketers will be able to fine-tune their messaging in near real time — an ad runs, you see exactly how many people searched for it afterward, and you know immediately how successful it was.
JM: In pharma, it goes one level deeper — you can actually identify whether an incremental prescription was written specifically by someone who saw the ad, versus someone who didn't. People often forget that pharma's measurement capability, done in a fully HIPAA-compliant way, is actually greater than what even CPG brands have access to — people assume CPG can do so much, but they genuinely can't measure what we can in pharma.
On interactivity, I've heard two competing views. One is that people don't want to interact because of privacy concerns. The other is that we see huge amounts of online health activity, much of which I'd attribute directly to that same sense of privacy — you can look up a condition you might not feel comfortable discussing with friends or even family, and learn more precisely because the internet offers that anonymity. Do you think interactivity actually gets a boost in pharma because it lets people privately learn more about a condition, or are there other factors pulling people away from engaging?
JF: No, I think you're exactly right about the private element. Over time, I think people will become more comfortable interacting with ads and searching for things directly, because most people already understand, on some level, that everything is connected and their identity gets figured out eventually anyway. If I don't directly interact with a Peacock ad, Peacock will likely still figure out who I am through some other connected data point, and eventually that data ends up connected to my searches regardless. I think, generally, people are going to become more comfortable over time knowing their data is essentially shared everywhere already, and that most brands and networks already have access to roughly the same information anyway.
JM: Does that create any concern for pharma marketers specifically, or do you think we're evolving past that concern as an industry, and as a society?
JF: I don't think it creates concern for pharma marketers — I actually think it makes their job easier over time. If there's more data available, and more willingness to share health-related information, even while people remain generally private, they still want to understand what's happening with their own bodies, and they'll pursue whatever path gets them that information.
JM: Ultimately, it's when you actually need help that you become willing to share things you otherwise wouldn't. That help matters so much, and feels so valuable in that moment, that people are willing to share information with a trusted third party — even a pharma company working to develop the actual cure for their problem.
JF: And there's probably real education work pharma still needs to do here — certain demographics are simply less open about their health than others. Men, for example, are far less open about their health than women. That's a genuine education opportunity.
JM: That's a good point. There's a lot of legislation right now aimed at protecting individual or population-level privacy, and one common argument is that you shouldn't be able to infer whether a person or group might have a particular condition. But that's really the foundation of all marketing — you infer whether someone might want to buy a Lexus based on other signals, and market to them accordingly, which increases your odds of actually selling that Lexus. In health, I'd argue it's almost dangerous not to do this. Some legislators want to restrict targeting based on ethnicity specifically, but conditions like sickle cell anemia disproportionately affect people of a specific ethnicity — if you can't target by ethnicity at all, you effectively can't target for that condition in any meaningful way either. How do we balance those two things, and where do you think the industry should land on this?
JF: Balance really is the key word. I think it starts with educating lawmakers — we've seen in hearings across a number of industries over the past few years that lawmakers often don't fully understand the technology or category they're trying to legislate. A lot of it comes down to helping them understand that if you rule out a certain kind of targeting entirely, there are population segments who simply won't receive messages relevant to them — and that could genuinely cost lives. That's probably less something for marketers to solve directly, and more something for pharma's lobbying efforts to communicate clearly to lawmakers.
JM: Jameson, we talk a lot in pharma about being "behind the times" when it comes to marketing techniques — but are there areas where you think pharma is actually leading, where other industries could learn from us?
JF: I think it's understanding exactly where your audience is and reaching them in very small, specific pockets. Consumer brands generally don't focus on that as much, because there's less to gain from investing in tiny micro-communities. But the lifetime value of a single patient in pharma, for a specific drug, can be enormous — if you reach someone early in that drug's time on the market, that can become a very long relationship. It's genuinely worth the time and investment to go into those micro-communities, listen to where people actually are, and build real relationships and trust. If you showed a typical consumer marketer just how nuanced and precise pharma's tracking is, for where people are actually interacting with and discussing a drug, I think they'd be genuinely amazed at what pharma is already capable of doing. That's probably the single biggest area where pharma is ahead.
JM: Definitely — and there's so much more on the line. One incremental sale of a tube of toothpaste is fine, but one incremental person overcoming their condition is something remarkable.
JF: Exactly.
JM: We've talked a lot about changes across the industry and in marketing broadly — how is MM+M itself changing?
JF: The biggest thing for us is becoming a genuine daily habit for people across the industry — pharma, agencies, all of it. We want the whole industry to feel like they should be coming to us daily and getting real value out of it. I recognize that if you're spending time with any trade publication, you might only have five minutes a day for it. Some MM+M devotees might give us 10, 15, even 20 minutes, but the average reader probably only has three to five minutes to spend with us. My whole focus is bringing more of the "how" and "why" behind what's happening in this industry into that daily experience. MM+M has always been phenomenal at telling you the "what" — if you need to know what's happening in the industry, we've got you covered.
But if someone's going to spend a few extra minutes with us, I want to peel back more of those layers and explain how and why something is happening — and not just in the print magazine, which is genuinely excellent, with reporting that's second to none. I want more of those deeper insights to show up online daily too, so that if you make us part of your morning routine, you get more than just headlines. That's the shift we're making, and we're getting there — the team of reporters and editors I work with is one of the most impressive I've encountered in my career.
JM: And the timing feels right, given how much is shifting legislatively and elsewhere in government — things really are changing on a daily basis right now, and we need to stay on top of it as it happens. Where do you think the next steps are for pharma?
JF: There are a lot of open questions right now, given the current administration. We don't yet know whether RFK Jr. will be friendly toward pharma broadly, or selectively target certain parts of the industry while leaving others alone. Trump has taken a populist stance on drug pricing, but the broader GOP hasn't necessarily aligned with that. There's real tension in Washington right now around the philosophy behind pharma policy, so the industry has a genuinely uncertain road ahead. I think the honest answer right now is: wait and see how the next six months unfold.
JM: On the off chance a legislator is listening to this podcast, what advice would you give them heading into the next session or two?
JF: For pharma broadly, I'd say: push for more transparency around pricing. That's the single thing that would have the biggest impact — helping people genuinely understand why our healthcare system is as expensive as it is, and pursuing real solutions from there. I don't think the solution is restricting advertising. Yes, brands spend enormous amounts marketing drugs, but I don't think banning advertising, or banning DTC advertising specifically, which RFK Jr. has floated, is the right solution, and I'd advise against it. That kind of bill has come up in Congress before and gone nowhere, and I think most legislators understand why. So my advice would be: pursue transparency, and leave DTC marketing alone.
JM: There does seem to be an assumption that DTC marketing is why drug prices are what they are — but in my experience, campaigns that don't work get shut down quickly. Their actual effect on pricing is almost the opposite of what people assume: brand usage fuels the marketing budget, and greater usage generally drives lower prices over time, due to scale. In a lot of ways, you could argue pharma marketing actually helps reduce costs in the long run. That seems to be roughly what you're describing.
JF: Right — and the real challenge is trying to convince the average person that drug prices aren't directly tied to how much advertising happens for a given drug. That's genuinely hard to explain to someone, because the average person just sees the amount of advertising, sees the price, and mentally connects the two.
JM: If you were talking to someone just starting their marketing career, whether in pharma or elsewhere, but especially someone entering pharma specifically, what advice would you give them for navigating this particular moment of change?
JF: I'd say: pay as much attention as you possibly can to marketing outside of pharma. There are so many great campaigns out there where the underlying insight applies directly to pharma. In every issue of our magazine, we ask a creative director to pick four campaigns and discuss them — usually they highlight pharma campaigns specifically. But we recently had a writer analyze four consumer campaigns instead, and pull out an insight or piece of execution that applied directly to pharma. It was brilliant, because you could see clear parallels between, say, a car campaign and a challenge some drug brand might face, whether that's reaching a specific audience or educating people about the product. There's so much great creative across all of marketing that, if you think hard enough about it, can be directly applied to whatever you're working on in pharma. That's where I think a lot of genuine inspiration can come from.
JM: Good marketing is good marketing, and the broader marketing industry keeps innovating — there are real trends and momentum we should be leveraging, rather than sticking to a 1990s-style pharma advertising playbook.
JF: Exactly.
JM: Great. Well, thank you, Jameson — I really appreciate you joining us today.
JF: Thanks for having me — I really enjoyed this.
JM: This has been Deep.
Links
- Apple Podcasts: Listen here
- Jameson Fleming on LinkedIn
- MM+M
- Adweek
Relevant Blog Posts: Why Pharmaceutical Advertising Matters Now More than Ever
