May 1, 2026
At DeepIntent's AdLab, Holly Dunn (Managing Director, Performance at Havas Media Network), Alice Harmon (Director of Omnichannel Analytics & Strategy at Lundbeck), and Andy Heath (SVP, Strategic Communications Planning at Havas Media Network) joined moderator Carrie Craigmyle (SVP, Strategy at DeepIntent) for a conversation on one of healthcare marketing's most urgent and underexplored topics: health equity. Together, they challenged our industry's assumptions about audience, access, and what it actually means to reach healthcare consumers.
Health Equity Affects Everyone
One of the panel's first and most striking points was that health equity is not a niche concern. Holly Dunn cited a survey in which 78% of people said they had personally experienced an equity challenge in receiving healthcare. "It's not just minority patients," she said. "Everybody faces something."
The barriers are far more varied than most marketers account for. For example, geography, insurance coverage, time, transportation, and cultural factors all play a role. Alice Harmon drew on her personal experience to make it concrete, describing her grandmother’s experience with dementia in a community served only by visiting specialists. "One in five Americans actually live in rural areas, and they have limited access to care,” she said. The stakes are significant: Dunn noted that people with inequitable access to healthcare live 17 years fewer, on average, than those with access.
Looking Beyond the Core Target
A recurring theme was the idea of the "invisible patient"—healthcare consumers who are unreachable through standard targeting because they don't fit the typical profile or aren't present in the usual channels. This led to a broader conversation about who else deserves to be in the media plan.
Andy Heath encourages his team to think about the full ecosystem around a patient. "There are no individual journeys,” he said. “These conditions, whatever they are, impact multiple people around that patient." He offered the example of a recent opioid brief in which the team reframed the audience entirely, focusing on what they called "recovery allies"—family members, friends, colleagues, or anyone who might notice a change and take action.
Harmon added that caregivers require creative thinking about channels and timing. For Lundbeck's Alzheimer's agitation treatment Rexulti, her team found younger caregivers in unexpected places: "The caregiver is showing up in spaces where we'd least expect, like Snapchat. So it does become about testing different channels, approaching it from a different lens.”
Patients Are Building Their Own Operating Systems
Heath introduced the concept of the "wellness stack,” the personalized collection of behaviors, products, and resources people assemble to manage their health, often outside the traditional system. "It's about consumers being in control and creating their own kind of operating systems," he explained. Telehealth, at-home testing, supplements, and LLM-powered research are all part of how patients work around systemic barriers.
Harmon connected this directly to the role of DTC advertising: "For the first time, patients have a sense of control. They're taking control of their own wellness." But Holly added that not everyone has access to the resources, time, or connectivity that make them possible, which is precisely why the industry's responsibility doesn't end with supporting the easy-to-reach.
Health Equity Can't Be a Side Project
The final major thread was about how to operationalize equity across strategy, creative, and measurement. "Health equity can't just be a project,” Harmon said. “It needs to be fundamental to everything that you do and part of your overall measurement strategy for it to be successful."
Dunn pointed to the Health Equity Marketplace that Havas and DeepIntent launched together as a practical step, making it easier for marketers to invest dollars where they have the greatest impact, whether that's scaling reach in health deserts or helping physicians identify at-risk patients earlier. She also pushed the conversation upstream: "As life science marketers, we have a responsibility to start it earlier. It can start in trials."
The panel's collective message was clear: the tools, data, and partnerships to address health equity already exist. The gap is in treating it as a strategic imperative rather than an add-on. With more industry voices bringing this conversation forward, and with platforms making equitable reach actionable, momentum is building. The next step is translating that awareness into consistent practice, measurable outcomes, and campaigns designed from the start to reach every healthcare consumer who needs them.
Check out more key takeaways from AdLab here.
