Glenniss Richards – solli sessions Season 3

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In-Housing, Integrity, and Innovation: How Bayer is Rewriting the Pharma Media Playbook

Glenniss Richards, Senior Director of Media Activation at Bayer U.S. Pharma, on building in-house from scratch, redefining compliant creativity, and why personalization and AI are shaping the future of patient and HCP engagement.

In this episode of solli Sessions, Glenniss Richards shares the inside story of one of the most ambitious media transformations in pharma — Bayer’s in-housing journey, which she led from the ground up. What began as “build the team, build the plane while flying it” has become a case study in agility, transparency, and executive-level alignment.

Glenniss unpacks how Bayer moved from external dependency to full internal activation across channels, why trust and change-management were the real unlocks, and how her team’s work now connects directly to real patients, caregivers, and outcomes. She reflects on the shift from pharma being “10 years behind” to a digitally-mature, data-driven landscape where first-party relationships, AI-powered curation, and social platform activation are advancing faster than ever.

What to expect from this episode:

Leading In-Housing at Scale
How Glenniss architected Bayer’s end-to-end media transformation — bringing every channel in-house in just 18 months and proving that disruption, when supported top-down, becomes momentum, not chaos.

Change-Management + Trust = Acceleration
Why cultural cohesion, transparency, and side-by-side alignment with analytics were more critical than tech stacks, and how building belief internally unlocked performance externally.

Pharma Isn’t Behind Anymore
Why Glenniss no longer buys into the industry cliché of slow adoption — and how peers across leading pharma are now “running full speed ahead” on first-party data, segmentation, and innovation.

Personalization Meets Regulation
How Bayer is advancing compliant innovation, proving that “there’s always a path of doing something compliant” — with caregiver insights, audience sophistication, and platform-fit creative at the center.

AI as Refinement, Not Revolution
Why AI isn’t new to media at Bayer — but smarter machine learning, optimization cues, and conversational interfaces are reshaping how patients and HCPs engage in real time.

Unified Measurement, Still the Missing Link
Why Glenniss calls for an industry-wide measurement framework to finally align cross-channel standards — from endemic to CTV to paid social — and make efficiency the norm, not a luxury.

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