With little to do and nowhere to go, millions of people spent the majority of 2020 on the couch, toggling between Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and once Netflix lost The Office, Peacock. When consumers embrace a channel, advertisers are sure to follow. From 2020 to 2021, Connected TV (CTV) ad spending grew 48%, one of the market’s most dramatic growth rates. On top of that, programmatic CTV represents unprecedented efficiency for healthcare marketers looking to reach people while they watch TV.

Optimizing Your Programmatic CTV Campaigns

Last year, linear TV represented 75% of pharma marketers’ advertising spend. While linear TV is the industry’s most popular marketing channel, it’s not the most effective. Programmatic CTV lets you leverage real-world clinical data, NPI lists, and first-party data to create campaign-specific healthcare provider (HCP) and HIPAA-compliant patient audiences. These will be much more refined than the demographic attributes used to plan linear TV ads, such as age, gender, and household income.

Creating the right audiences is just the beginning of a programmatic CTV campaign. Far more important is what happens during the campaign.

Between audience, media, and messaging, there are countless parameters for all of your programmatic CTV campaigns. Machine learning algorithms can analyze them and take millions of inputs into account, optimizing your campaigns in real time. The algorithms also learn and self-improve continuously, resulting in better, faster, and more cost-effective campaigns.

What’s more, you can optimize your programmatic CTV campaigns toward the metrics that matter most. While video completion rate is a traditional optimization metric, it’s an indirect performance measure. Audience quality and script performance, on the other hand, are directly tied to your brand’s business objectives — and better patient outcomes.

Looking Beyond the Buy

You’ve activated your campaign, maximized its performance, and generated a ton of valuable campaign data along the way. Then what?

Performance data from your programmatic CTV campaigns allows you to glean insights that inform future marketing strategies beyond the media buy. Take a campaign advertising a Type 2 Diabetes treatment. Analyzing script volume by geography, you may notice a considerable difference in the number of scripts filled within The Villages, Florida, and Orlando, Florida.

While these two cities are just 60 miles apart, they’re home to drastically different populations. The Villages happens to have the country’s oldest population and thus is likely to be home to more Type 2 Diabetes patients than Orlando, where the average resident is 33 years old. With this prescription performance geographical insight, you can inform future media buys, marketing in different locations accordingly.

Thinking ahead like that keeps you on a forward trajectory, improving your campaign performance over time, and reaching the right HCP and patient audiences where they are: in front of a CTV device.

To learn more about planning, optimizing, and learning from your programmatic CTV campaigns, download Looking Beyond Linear TV: How Healthcare Marketers Can Improve Performance and Patient Outcomes With Connected TV.