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Bill Veltre, EVP and Head of Media at Deerfield, joins healthcare advertising leader John Mangano on Deep to share sharp insights from a career spanning agencies, brands, and the frontlines of healthcare marketing. From mastering the art of bite-sized content for distracted audiences to building authentic partnerships between clients, agencies, and partners, Bill unpacks what it really takes to connect in today’s crowded media landscape.
In this fast-moving conversation, he explores how data, technology, and curiosity fuel better storytelling, whether it’s tailoring messages for overburdened HCPs, making patient communications resonate, or leveraging next best action strategies that actually work. Along the way, he challenges the idea that pharma is “behind,” pointing to innovations in AI, personalization, and real-time measurement already transforming the industry.
Full of practical wisdom and candid perspective, this episode delves into how the most effective marketing starts with empathy, agility, and a deep understanding of your audience. It also highlights why the next 24 months will transform what's possible in healthcare communication.
Transcript:
John Mangano (JM): Welcome to Deep, the health marketing podcast. I'm here today with Bill Veltre, Executive Vice President, Head of Media at Deerfield. Welcome, Bill.
Bill Veltre (BV): Thanks, John, for having me.
JM: It's great to have you, Bill. You've been a fixture in pharma for quite some time, but what's really interesting to me is where you came from before that. Here at Deep, we like to focus on the people in healthcare and pharma — the patients, the prescribers, and those of us working in the industry — and you have a background I don't think I've come across yet on this podcast. You were an elementary school teacher before working in this industry. Is that as different as it sounds? Honestly, I sometimes feel like I've behaved more like an elementary schooler myself in some moments on the job. What have you noticed — how does that compare to what you do today?
BV: I can definitely vouch for your behavior — kidding. Let's go backwards. Right now I'm EVP, Head of Media at Deerfield Group. Before this, I was on the client side, at BMS, in an omnichannel strategy role as a senior director overseeing a franchise. When I started at BMS, I was in the oncology franchise, as you mentioned. Before that, I was on the brand team at AbbVie, where I spent a lot of time building two really strong brands in the migraine space — Ubrelvy and Qulipta — alongside an amazing team.
Before that, I spent all my time on the agency side, working for two holding companies, WPP and Publicis. And before that, I was on the media-partner side — I actually worked at Elsevier. So I've touched what I like to call the "triad" — the three groups I consider the most important in our industry, outside of patients themselves.
And before all of that, I worked in sales and marketing, on the content side, at a publishing company that sold educational curriculum. That was actually the career right after I left the classroom, where I was a first-grade teacher, in the district I grew up in, for 32 wide-eyed, open, incredibly eager-to-learn first graders. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career — really my first real experience in the professional world. But what's interesting, to your point, is how much that grounding in education shows up in everything I do now. I find myself teaching every single day — whether it's my team, partners we work with, or clients. We're constantly on an educational journey, and that's so important in an industry that evolves as quickly as ours, in order to keep delivering new solutions and the best possible care for patients.
JM: I feel like, in some ways, first graders and adults aren't all that different. Honestly, first graders might be the most authentic version of who we really are. And when it's all said and done, connecting with the raw emotion of a small child is still, in many ways, how we connect and make decisions as adults. Have you seen that hold true?
BV: Yes, a hundred percent. It's been 20 years since I was in the classroom, which is wild to even say. A lot of my former students, now adults, have reached out and told me they remember me as their first-grade teacher, which is crazy. It's interesting how much people have changed because of the technology we've all been exposed to since then. The first graders I taught didn't grow up with iPhones or iPads — that technology wasn't in their hands yet. Our constant engagement with technology has definitely affected our attention spans.
Some recent studies I've read suggest adult attention spans have decreased significantly — where we used to sustain active engagement for around 15 minutes, we're now down to something like 8 to 10 minutes, and honestly that's probably on the generous end. That's something I think about every single day: how do I keep conversations engaging, but short, simple, and ultimately action-oriented, because I know most people I'm talking to have a genuinely short attention span right now.
JM: I think that holds true in healthcare too. Doctors probably fall into that same pattern — if anything, they probably wish they had more time to talk with their patients. They're distracted themselves, and I'd argue patients are too, even sitting in the exam room, when we're trying to market to them. Have you seen that same shift?
BV: Sure — let's call it what it is: physicians are people. We're all the same; our attention spans are all shrinking, but what's really changed is our expectation of immediacy in getting answers. That's something I find really interesting when it comes to HCP marketing broadly. My husband is actually an HCP — he's an ICU nurse at Temple — and his attention span is genuinely short, I can vouch for that personally. But I also see that the content he actually consumes has to be bite-sized and to the point. He doesn't have time to scroll through endless emails or long web content — he's looking for that quick hit of information. I think that's true for the majority of the customers we're marketing to.
There's also just an overwhelming volume of information out there. I think physicians genuinely feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content they're shown, and that's pushed us to evolve our strategies — engaging physicians more deeply across the omnichannel ecosystem, and leaning into the specific areas where they already have real affinities. A lot of what we do on the media side comes down to audience identification and learning.
JM: Do you also find they bring wildly different levels of existing knowledge to the table? Do you feel the need to tailor messaging not just to how much information they can absorb in a given moment, but also to what they may already know, given how varied that baseline knowledge can be?
BV: Ideally, the goal is to be as tailored as possible — I don't think anyone's fully cracked that yet, given the lag in data and our ability to turn around a touchpoint quickly enough to complete the story arc in real time. Physicians are unique — they have unique habits and an interesting work-life balance. When they're in the office, they're laser-focused on patients and clinical outcomes. When they're not, they're often trying to catch up on their own education or prepare for the next day's caseload.
Physicians have such limited bandwidth to engage with our messaging that we have to be extremely tailored just to capture their attention — but that requires a massive volume of content to pull off well. One thing I learned on the brand side is that you rarely have the budget to produce all the content variety you'd actually want. So you really have to plan ahead, know your audience deeply, and understand the story you're trying to tell for that product — how that individual physician is going to engage with each piece of content, and how you ultimately complete that story in small pieces, giving them everything the brand has to offer by the time they're making a clinical decision.
JM: It's interesting — you see this when you visit doctors' offices. Some are extremely tech-forward, everything's computerized, you check in at a kiosk and barely talk to a person. Others still have paper folders behind the front desk, and you think, "Wow, I haven't seen that in years." I don't think that's so different from what we see in marketing. Across different companies, and even different roles within pharma, how they leverage technology and communication varies wildly — some are still working from paper files, others are extremely advanced. What variances have you seen, and where do you see the opportunities?
BV: It's funny — I was recently at my own family physician's office, and she logged into the EHR system, turned to me, and said, "I don't know why this thing isn't working — they didn't teach us tech classes in medical school." I actually laughed, because it's so accurate — they're not training physicians to be tech experts while they're learning to diagnose and treat some of the world's most complex chronic conditions.
I do think physicians are leaning into technology, but I wouldn't say there's a large group of them who are true power users. Mostly, the technology they use is centered on electronic health records, streamlining communication around patient information, sending prescriptions, and coordinating with pharmacies.
But I think there's a real need for education on how to get the most out of the content they're engaging with from a technology standpoint — whether that's video, podcasts, or attending virtual conferences, which we saw a lot of during the pandemic. Physicians have generally been willing to adopt these tools when it makes the patient experience better. And we can't forget telemedicine — that's the thing everyone really wants to get right. I've actually used telemedicine platforms myself with some of my own physicians recently, and it's been genuinely telling — a great communication tool, a real convenience, and even the ability to record conversations and revisit them later has been valuable. So technology is definitely embedded in a lot of how we engage physicians now — but I wouldn't say any single group of physicians has fully mastered it yet.
JM: I think a lot of it comes down to age and where someone is in their career. My daughter's a freshman in college, and the way she uses technology is beyond anything I use today — even though I probably have more technology at my fingertips than she does, it's just deeply ingrained in her in a way it isn't for someone even 10 years older than me, further along in their career, who's done things a certain way for a long time. I'd imagine healthcare providers fall along that same spectrum. We see it in our own business too. When we think about how we communicate as marketers, to patients or HCPs, what differences are you seeing across the industry in how effectively people are using technology to get the message across? This isn't the first industry I've worked in, but it's certainly the most important one to me as a marketer — I know that if we can do this better, people genuinely feel better and live better lives. So it matters that we keep optimizing.
BV: Agreed. Let's talk about next-best-action. Our industry has always been rooted in putting the customer at the center of the brand — a sales rep as the face and voice of the brand, that in-person connection, building on that relationship over time. Now we're able to tell a much more cohesive story by understanding which parts of that story have already been delivered in person — using Salesforce mechanisms that track when a call closes and what should happen next, based on what the physician still needs to hear. If a rep has only covered clinical benefits so far, and safety or efficacy still needs to be covered, you want to make sure the physician sees that in their non-personal promotion touchpoints — an email, a banner ad, a video, or contextually relevant content on a site where you're running display.
Collectively, a next-best-action engine takes all of those touchpoints and shapes a genuinely unique experience for each physician — something we've never really been able to do before. I think it's getting stronger across our industry and becoming a real cornerstone of HCP marketing. It goes back to what I said earlier — physicians are overwhelmed. We simply cannot send them more emails. The volume my husband gets from every partner imaginable is astronomical; there's just not enough time in the day to read through all of that on top of his actual clinical work. So it's genuinely exciting to see next-best-action engines maturing and working well right now.
JM: Ten years ago, it was exciting just to have the ability to keep messaging continuously. Now we can actually understand whether the message landed, and tailor the next one based on how successful the last one was. That matters enormously — if a drug has real side effects, it's critical that the doctor fully understands them, and now we can confirm that's actually happened, which is an incredible capability.
Bill, you've worked on both sides — agency and brand — which gives you a really unique perspective on how those two sides work together, and how each views their role in messaging to patients. What was the biggest eye-opener when you moved from one side to the other?
BV: I love that question. When I moved from agency to the client side, the first thing I realized is how much more clients do than just media. I used to assume they only had time for me, which, admittedly, was a fairly self-centered way to see it. Once I got to the client side, I saw how much work actually goes into building and sustaining a brand — brand positioning, forecasting supply and demand, distribution and patient support programs, sales force effectiveness, training, speaker programs. The collective effort behind a brand team is genuinely underrated.
Working on a brand might be the hardest job in our industry. There's immense pressure to hit a forecast — it's entirely numbers-driven — but behind that forecast are actual patients. Keeping a brand afloat requires an incredibly intricate, team-oriented effort, synchronizing so many capabilities. I was honestly blown away by the sheer number of people working behind the scenes that I never got to interact with while I was on the agency side.
JM: For agency folks listening right now, what advice do you wish you'd received when you were still on that side, now that you've seen the brand side too?
BV: On the agency side, people often ask, "What keeps you up at night?" On the brand side, it's not just one thing — it's five, six, maybe ten things, especially if you're the brand lead. There's a lot of pressure, rooted in your ability to bring a brand to market, keep it there, hit your forecast, and be able to tell that story to leadership in a way that gives them what they need to communicate success — especially if it's a publicly traded company.
My advice would be: understand that the client has real time and space for you, but any given conversation with you is just one moment in a much larger picture, and they often need to be brought back up to speed quickly. They'll sometimes ask questions that catch you off guard, but that's because they're managing a massive ecosystem behind the scenes — a huge amount of storytelling is required just to showcase the success of the work you're doing on the agency side, against what they're ultimately accountable for on the client side.
JM: And flipping that around — since you've also been on the agency side — what would you tell a brand person about working better with their agency?
BV: That's a great question. It's tricky, because you don't want to sound too preachy, but at the end of the day: don't forget about your agency. There's enormous value in transparency. Something I always prided myself on was being fully transparent with my agency partners, sharing the actual goals I was trying to hit. When there's mutual understanding of that, the work is consistently better, and there's much more grace during periods of pressure or stress, because they understand exactly where things are falling short or exceeding expectations.
So to any clients listening — think of your agency as a genuine extension of your brand team. I know that's a phrase we throw around a lot in this industry, but when it actually works, it's magical. You gain additional hands, minds, and ears, all genuinely contributing toward the goals you're trying to hit.
JM: That partnership matters so much, because agencies, by their very design, have a speed and scale to execute that a brand simply can't match on its own, given the nature of being a pharma company. They can genuinely feed off each other well, as long as the relationship isn't purely transactional — more of an extension of the same team.
BV: You just named my two favorite things. Probably my biggest pet peeve in this industry is when anyone gets treated as a "vendor." I don't build in that kind of transactionality when I'm strategizing with clients or partners like yourself. My whole career has instilled the idea of partnership from day one. I genuinely believe that when everyone's all in, with real skin in the game, they work together far more effectively, and the results of that collective effort are much greater than three separate silos working in isolation.
I talk about "the triad" a lot — the client, the agency, and the media partner. When you get all three firing on all cylinders, results improve significantly — you see it in campaign performance, in hitting forecasts, in the partner's own numbers, and in keeping the agency's P&L healthy.
JM: Absolutely — and you've always been a great partner, which I can say having worked alongside you in a few different roles over the years, since we all seem to move around a lot in this industry. Let's talk about how many different spaces exist in our space right now, specifically around channels. We're in such a rapidly changing environment — regulatory changes, which of course tie into the shifting political environment influencing all of that, but also just media itself. Looking back to when we each started our careers, I'd guess at least half of the media we work with today didn't even exist yet.
BV: You're not kidding.
JM: It's wild, because I'd bet that in another 5 or 10 years, there'll be twice as many new channels added to what we already have. We're in a massively shifting landscape. What are you seeing right now, how do we stay ahead of the changes, and what do you think the next couple of years will look like?
BV: Great question. I wish I had a crystal ball, but I really think it comes down to curiosity. We have to stay genuinely curious about everything evolving around us — new channels, new ways to engage patients, HCPs, caregivers, payers. There's always something new right around the corner — whether that's AI reshaping how we gather information from a search standpoint, or new video formats changing how we engage with each other and consume content, like we're doing right now on this podcast.
There's just so much change happening in how we consume information, and I think the way you stay current is simply by engaging with it directly. Don't be afraid — lean in, listen to podcasts, listen to the radio, pay attention to how advertisers, in pharma and outside of it, are using these mediums. We just came off the Super Bowl — go Birds — and beyond just watching the commercials, think about the actual messages embedded in them. What story were they telling? How did they layer in other channels alongside the spot? There's so much you can learn just from the advertising industry as a whole.
Again, it goes back to being a teacher — you really have to lean in, get your hands around it, experience it firsthand, in order to ask the right questions. Why does it work this way? How could we make it better? What's the actual benefit of video over audio in this case? When I'm talking with my team or with clients, we're rarely talking about "test and learn" anymore — I think that's a somewhat outdated framework. It's really about experiencing it directly, understanding what it feels like, and accepting that it doesn't always have to work perfectly. We need to be comfortable showing that we tried something, and I think we'll keep getting smarter about that as we learn more about our audiences and how they retain information most effectively.
JM: That answer went somewhere I honestly didn't expect, in a really good way. I expected we'd talk about technology and channels — the usual marketer toolkit — but you focused instead on how people actually communicate and receive a message. That surprised me pleasantly. I'd never quite framed it that way, but really, the channel almost doesn't matter — it's the message, and how it's actually received, that counts. I see this with my daughter, a generation or two behind me — I genuinely can't talk to her the same way I'd talk to a peer. She and her friends are processing messages completely differently, and that's remarkable.
BV: I always say, at the end of the day, the vehicle and the channel don't matter if you don't have a solid communication strategy behind it — it's simply not worth your time otherwise. You have to deeply understand your audience, dig into how they're actually going to receive the message, and make sure your communication lands in the way that's most effective for them. That requires real agility, and often a wide range of content and creative variations on hand. But fundamentally, it's about being audience-centric rather than product-centric. I think we sometimes focus too much on ourselves versus who we're actually talking to — maybe that's the teacher in me, thinking constantly about how everyone learns differently. I think about that a lot when we're building a media plan, or exploring a new audience — really digesting everything we know about them, not just as a target segment, but as actual people. Where do their affinities really lie?
JM: Right — and honestly, we haven't changed all that much. Think of a first grader — extremely emotionally reactive. Now think of a patient, and depending on the condition, those emotions get amplified even further. We deal with plenty of stress in our own workday, sure, but when you're dealing with a sick child, or a disease that could change or even end your life, how you receive a message — its tone, whether it leans into fear or hope, whatever it's actually conveying — lands completely differently than it would for someone like us, unless we're personally living with that condition. When we talk about audience segmentation in marketing generally, this just amplifies it — you're segmenting a message for someone dealing with something genuinely critical in their world.
BV: Agreed. We work in the best industry, honestly, because there's real heart behind everything we do — it's a deeply empathetic industry. You have to understand the patient at the core: what are they struggling with, what barriers are they facing, and how does your marketing, your product, your strategy actually help them reach a better place in their life? Whether that's one more day of life, or one more day free of a symptom that's been plaguing them — it's a genuinely caring industry, precisely because we have to put the patient at the center of everything we do. When we get that right on the marketing side, it becomes that much easier for a patient to feel like someone out there genuinely understands them, giving them hope, and a real path toward a solution that improves their life.
JM: You worked in the migraine category, and I think that's a perfect example. Migraine is awful, but you can live with it — that's coming from someone who's never personally had one. But if you're actually in a migraine episode, dealing with auras and every other symptom building up, it's genuinely debilitating. It shuts you down completely, pulls you away from your family, your work — and that's exactly who you're trying to reach, and speak to, with real specificity.
BV: The one thing I encourage everyone to do, whether you're on the agency side or the client side, is to actually go listen to patient interviews and patient research — let them explain their own signs, symptoms, and struggles directly. I never fully understood how debilitating migraine could be until I sat behind the glass, as a marketer, listening to real patient interviews. I was genuinely floored by what these people were dealing with — missing their own daughter's wedding, being unable to get out of bed for work multiple days in a row, even losing a job because of a condition they had no real control over.
Out of every condition I've ever worked on, migraine taught me the most about empathy, by far. It's this strange "doorknob condition" — you go into the doctor's office, talk about your heart, your diabetes, these bigger, more visible conditions, and then, right as the doctor's about to walk out, they ask, almost as an afterthought, "Oh, and how are those migraines?" And sometimes patients don't feel comfortable sharing enough in that moment, because it doesn't feel like a priority — they feel like they just have to live with the pain and accept it. That's exactly why we're here — to give them a real solution that could actually help alleviate those symptoms. Seeing the real struggles of migraine patients was a genuinely life-changing experience for me, and it shaped my entire career afterward, focused on helping people just like them.
JM: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about pharma? We've all had that moment at a social gathering where someone asks what we do, and when you explain "pharma marketing," they respond with, "Oh, you mean those ads?" What do you think people don't understand about pharma — or what do you think we, within the industry, don't fully appreciate about ourselves?
BV: I think what others miss, largely because of how the media portrays it, is the assumption that it's all about money and not about genuinely caring — when at the core, it really is about caring. It's a deeply empathetic industry, and I can't say that enough. That's one of the biggest misconceptions — that we're only in it for the dollars. Every company is, in some sense, profit-driven, but they have to generate that revenue in order to fund and produce the medicines that will help the next patient. It's a necessary cycle that keeps the industry moving forward.
I think what we, within the industry, underappreciate is just how advanced we've actually become at understanding our customers and using technology effectively. Because there are so many different stakeholders involved in decision-making, a lot of that real technological progress tends to get overlooked. I constantly hear people say pharma is "so far behind" — I honestly don't think we're nearly as far behind as people assume. We've made huge strides over the last several years, keeping pace with broader advertising and ad tech. A lot of great solutions have come to market and delivered real results for brands. But you usually only hear about the biggest players, because it's easy to talk about the companies with massive marketing budgets — there are plenty of smaller and mid-sized pharma companies doing genuinely great work to help patients too.
JM: On the marketing side specifically, we're often well ahead of the rest of the industry. I saw this firsthand early in my career at comScore, where I worked alongside colleagues covering other verticals — finance, retail — and they'd ask how we measured campaign impact the way we did, and they'd say, "We don't even have that kind of data." The depth of insight you can get from claims data is immense, and we learn so much from it — not just for marketing, but for understanding how well brands are actually supporting patients. And we do all of that while maintaining a higher standard of privacy than almost any other industry. I think we tend to focus on HIPAA as a constraint holding us back, without realizing we're actually doing remarkable things while still fully respecting patient privacy.
BV: Let's flip that around — imagine working on a CPG brand with the same regulatory scrutiny we operate under. We should honestly be commended for that level of rigor. There are so many checks and balances required just to execute and measure a single campaign. That rigorous process, I think, actually teaches you to be a far better marketer than simply launching a CPG product where you can say almost anything about it. It forces you to understand your marketing strategy, execution strategy, and measurement strategy at a much deeper level — honestly, it's closer to a masterclass in marketing than the "substandard" or "behind the times" reputation the industry's had over the years.
We're not behind — we're doing great work. Look at some of the recent Super Bowl ads — even the unbranded, corporate-focused ones were genuinely empathetic, patient-forward, and did a great job showcasing how the industry is moving the needle on major conditions. I don't work with that particular client, but I genuinely applaud that work. We need to keep championing and advocating for each other across this industry, and start speaking more optimistically about the work we're actually doing.
JM: When we talk to patients directly, research is now showing they appreciate these ads more than they used to — they're actually learning from them. Part of that is us getting better at the message itself, but part of it is also that patients are simply more accustomed to it than they were 15 years ago. It's funny — in those social settings, when people find out you work on "those ads," you either hear, "I have that condition, and it's actually helped me," or, "Well, I don't have that condition." Honestly, my reaction is always: be thankful you don't, but it's still good to know the solution exists. And you actually mentioned RA earlier, which most people wouldn't know much about otherwise — if a doctor ever tells you that you have RA, hopefully they won't, but if they do, you'll already have information you never had before, and you'll know there's hope and treatment available, simply because it's been communicated to you so many times before.
BV: Exactly. Think about it — the informed patient is such a unique advantage we have in this country, being able to market directly to patients. It's really about the power of choice. I say this a lot: everything in life is a choice, even choosing not to choose is still a choice. Having the ability to actually weigh in on your own treatment, based on knowledge you've gained yourself, is an incredibly powerful position to be in as a patient, regardless of the condition. You have so much information at your fingertips, and being part of that communication process is rewarding in a lot of different ways.
What it ultimately leads to is a kind of acceptance — accepting that patients are going to be informed, and that we need to meet them where they are. Their questions come from genuine curiosity, because they've taken the time to educate themselves. And at the end of the day, what we're doing is enabling their condition to actually be treated, and providing a real solution. We're the solution for them — so we have to be the answer, not a barrier, not a problem. We have to keep driving toward the best possible outcomes for patients.
JM: Definitely. If you'll leave us with one thought — what excites you most about the next 24 months, and how it'll affect all of us?
BV: The next 24 months are going to be about speed — our ability to drive results faster. It's going to be the connectivity between AI-driven solutions and much more streamlined execution, combined with our ability to measure in real time. If we can connect all of those pieces, the next two years should deliver better outcomes for patients, better success rates for HCPs, and I'd assume stronger financial results for payers too. Ultimately, I think every stakeholder rises together on that tide, and our industry sits right at the center of it, with real influence over how that plays out. We're going to keep moving forward as an industry, but much faster — we're about to start running, after years of essentially crawling and walking.
JM: Thank you, Bill. This has been a great conversation — so glad you could join us.
BV: Thanks for having me, John.
JM: This has been Deep.
Links
- Bill Veltre on LinkedIn
- Deerfield Group
- AbbVie — referenced for the Ubrelvy and Qulipta brands Bill worked on
Relevant Blog Posts: Effective Pharmaceutical Marketing Strategies for Modern Brands
