Building Awareness & Demand Among Likely Patients: An Audience-Based Approach for Pharma

How can a pharmaceutical brand win with TV advertising? By using rich data to inform the media strategy

For a major pharmaceutical brand that had just received FDA approval of a new prescription medication in late 2021, a television advertising campaign was a sure way to build brand awareness, at scale, among likely patients. But given the goals for the campaign and nature of the product they were bringing to market, relying on broad age/demo television buys to reach consumers would not get the ROI needed.

The brand worked with leading independent agency Butler/Till who partnered with OpenAP to develop an advanced audience, multi-platform strategy. Together, we clearly demonstrated the power of pivoting from buying on traditional linear guarantees to a much more valuable guaranteed metric–impression delivery on a strategic audience.

The Strategy

OpenAP collaborated with Butler/Till to design a two-part strategy:

First, build a strategic audience of likely patients for the prescription.

Then, activate that audience for targeting across multiple publishers and platforms to maximize reach.

Using rich data to inform who to target and where to reach them across screens and publishers paid off for the brand. Not only did the campaign exceed KPIs, it set the bar for the pharma industry as a whole.

This campaign gave us insight into who our audience is and what they're doing with their time outside of TV consumption. Those are valuable data points that you just can't get with conventional TV buying, and we were able to immediately leverage those insights in our planning for the future.