Pharma Media in Cannes

Cannes may be over, but the conversations it sparked are just beginning. At solli, our mission is to elevate the practice of media within pharma-and this feature captures how pharma media showed up, stood out, and contributed to the dialogue at the festival.

We’ve gathered honest takes, sharp observations, and behind-the-scenes moments from leaders who were on the ground in Cannes. These reflections aim to extend the energy and insights of the festival across the broader pharma media landscape-ensuring they drive tangible impact on our shared goals as a community.

Wish you were here, because what a week it was!
Cannes Lions 2025 was one to remember for Doceree. We began with a bang, winning Silver under the Pharma Lions category for our DawAI Reader campaign with Alkem Laboratories and Lowe Lintas – India’s first Pharma win of the year – moment of pride, empowerment that spoke of the potential of technology to change lives, especially of the underprivileged.

The momentum continued with our exclusive roundtable with MM+M, asking a bold question — Does programmatic marketing for HCPs need a rebrand? Set against the stunning Cannes backdrop, the room buzzed with candid conversations around contextual AI, changing physician behaviors, and the need to reframe how we communicate in healthcare marketing. The energy was unmatched.

We also had meaningful conversations with new and existing partners around audience extension, AI in discovery, and collaborative innovation to amplify Doceree’s differentiated offerings.

It was certainly a week of wins, ideas, and possibilities. We laughed, we learned, we celebrated — and we return inspired to keep shaping the future of healthcare marketing.

As is with all media agency processes, there is of course an evolving role of Artificial Intelligence in media planning. While AI offers significant automation potential, the irreplaceable human element remains paramount. At CMI Media Group, we have explored automating the media planning processes. It had to begin with normalizing vast datasets to train ML algorithms for optimal plan creation. This was a hot topic at Cannes, where most agreed that AI will complement and optimize the human process that is critical for overall omni channel strategy.

In our journey, we initially explored Generative AI-driven prompts for planners, but encountered limitations, specifically its inconsistency with complex numerical data, leading to inconsistent data output. Instead of a full generative AI prompt, we focused on predictive AI engine that automates supplier recommendations, presenting results in a dashboard format. This media planning assistant aims to empower planners by sifting through large amounts of data that is difficult to process manually in a timely manner. While AI excels at crunching historical data, introducing new, innovative suppliers – including those we met at the Cannes Festival – still requires human intelligence to strategically integrate them.

Another challenge lies not in the technology itself, but in client approvals and legal understanding, particularly for a healthcare agency dealing with sensitive data. Clients’ legal teams need to understand what these AI driven solutions actually do with the data that is being used and confirm that they are secure and private. Ultimately, we advocate for understanding AI’s specific strengths, ensuring it serves as a powerful and secure complement to, rather than a substitute for, the indispensable human touch in media strategy.

Bonjour from the sun-kissed shores of the French Riviera!

While my trip began with a brief delay waiting for my hotel room, the stunning view of the Riviera made it more than worthwhile. This year, the presence of pharma marketing was more visible than ever; from the Croisette beach stages to the awards podium, where the creativity and innovation of healthcare marketers earned well-deserved Golden Lions.

Through Swoop-sponsored speaking sessions, we brought together industry leaders for intimate discussions tailored specifically for pharma marketers, ensuring our voice resonated amid the broader media and AdTech dialogue.

Packed sessions confirmed what many of us already feel: Healthcare marketers are ready to embrace the evolving TV landscape. Personalization, performance, and privacy are reshaping how we approach TV, and our industry is more than capable of adapting. We’re experienced in navigating regulation and will continue to apply data-driven strategies, artificial intelligence, and breakthrough creative to ensure patients learn about life-changing treatments.

This momentum carried into my Beet.TV interview, where I shared thoughts on the future of healthcare marketing, and highlighted the urgent need to overcome TV fragmentation so brands can find and reach patients across every channel and in every state.

From inspiring panels to energizing conversations and memorable celebrations, Cannes Lions 2025 reminded me that collaboration and innovation will continue to define the future of healthcare marketing.

See you next year on La Croisette!

Top left: At the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit, Swoop CRO Katie Carr, NBCU Senior Vice President, Client Partnerships, Advertising & Partnerships Abbey Berryman, IPG Health Global President, IPG Mediabrands Health, Melisa Gordon-Ring, and Executive Director, Head of Global Media at Amgen spoke about the evolving TV landscape and applying data-driven strategies.

Top right: Swoop Chief Revenue Officer Katie Carr speaks at the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit on the Rado Beach Stage.

Bottom left: One of the stunning views from Cannes.

Bottom center: In a fireside chat with Beet.TV, Genentech VP, Chief Marketing Officer Erica Taylor shared how personalization, performance, and privacy are reshaping the advertising landscape

Bottom right: During the Beet.TV leadership Sessions, at the Mondrian Hotel’s Infillion Café on La Croisette, moderator Michael Shields spoke with Genentech Head of Media & Innovation Marc Minassian, Swoop CRO Katie Carr, The Trade Desk Senior Director of Business Development Lindsay Reardon, and Publicis Health Media Chief Executive Officer Andrea Palmer about how data collaboration, real-time optimization, and media innovation are redefining how healthcare brands connect with audiences in a privacy-first world across CTV, programmatic video, and beyond.

This year at Cannes Lions, healthcare creativity took center stage—not by mimicking consumer trends, but by rewriting the rules entirely. For pharmaceutical marketers, the takeaways are both inspiring and instructive.

The Pharma Grand Prix winner, “Make Love Last – Bedroom” (Ogilvy Shanghai for Viatris), offers a powerful lesson in emotional economy. With no voiceover, no body copy, and no overt medical claims, it delivered intimacy and empathy, two values often missing from pharma communications. Lesson: Don’t underestimate the power of subtlety. In highly regulated environments, visual storytelling can humanize brands without compromising compliance.

Meanwhile, “The Last Barf Bag” for Dramamine (Health & Wellness Grand Prix) proved that humor has a place in health. Its irreverent tone reframed a routine remedy as a nostalgic icon, creating genuine cultural relevance. Lesson: Creative risk-taking, when grounded in insight—can break stigma and spark engagement in even the most unglamorous categories.

Finally, “Friedreich’s Back” (21 Grams/Biogen) is a campaign that reimagines 19th-century scientist Nikolaus Friedreich rising from the grave to make sense of a world where a treatment now exists for the disease he discovered. This campaign uses dark humor allowing a community to laugh which helps  them to cope with a devastating rare condition. Lesson: Don’t just join the conversation, shape it. Understand what your audience needs and don’t be afraid to use humor to create an authentic connection.

The broader message? In 2025, healthcare creativity isn’t about playing it safe, it’s about finding truth and telling it with originality. Marketers willing to lean into authenticity, humor, and evidence-based storytelling will not only win awards, they’ll win loyalty.

This was my first time at Cannes, and I was struck by the scale but also what it represented. On my star-studded flight back to NYC, I tried to stay awake and collect a few thoughts. Here’s what I’ll be carrying with me until next year:

I’ve always thought that “pharma is 5–10 years behind” was a self-fulfilling prophecy. At Cannes, that narrative felt outdated. Despite the inherent legal, privacy, and regulatory complexity, pharma marketers showed up next to other categories as trendsetters. From the panels and meetings I attended, we’re moving forward much more than we’re stuck in the past. Gaps in targeting, inventory, content, and measurement are being closed, and agencies, publishers, and platforms are pushing the art of the possible. This is fun.

For many companies, Cannes is a competition to attract attention: crowds, activations, and celebrity panels. I think it’s a perfect metaphor for pharma marketers. Kinesso’s Faryn Brown recently said something I loved: “You’re going to get outspent, so how are you going to win?” That’s the question. The best interactions I had with clients and partners weren’t flashy. They were personal, productive, and meant to be continued. Ultimately, that’s how we’ll achieve better business and patient outcomes—not with noise but by creating relevant engagements, trust, and salience in moments that matter. That’s how we win.

This is Casey, sending a postcard from Cannes!  Cannes is hot, both literally and figuratively. The heat even caused electricity issues as pharma media, advertising, and tech leaders gathered to exchange ideas about what is possible. The pharmaceutical sector reminded the world that creativity in healthcare isn’t just possible, it’s essential.

Audio and podcasts remain hot. Whether it’s the Kelce brothers on a panel at the IPG House or Malcolm Gladwell having a presence – content in audio remain at the forefront with content and tech coming together. Another hot topic coming to the forefront is women in sports. The Female Quotient hosted panels on the rising spotlight of women’s sports, highlighting the growing opportunity for connection and community in this increasingly visible space.

As Cannes wraps up – I was looking for ways to stay cool with all these hot ideas swirling around. Ways to stay cool in Cannes include but not limited to:

• Grabbing a personal fan from LinkedIn at The Carlton
• A Ferragamo straw hat from the Female Quotient Lounge to hide from the sun
• Sipping champagne at The Magestic
• Taking a yacht ride to Sainte Marguerite

As I look forward to America’s air conditioning- I was most thankful to catch up with colleagues, clients and even make new connections with industry leaders. Cannes did not disappoint, and that’s hot.

We come to Cannes every year to take the temperature of the industry, and this year was hotter than ever for the healthcare vertical. As someone in the data space, I’m always tracking where technological progress is advancing to the point of maturity where brands can reliably embrace it and I can make it more efficient. That’s playing out in two areas this year- CTV and AI.

The two biggest announcements to my ears were the Amazon/Roku partnership and Disney’s opening its inventory on a range of DSPs. While the role of CTV as more than augmenting linear has been clear for some time, these moves make its centrality here and now finally clear. As for AI, we are now seeing applications in the creative space and in workflow efficiencies driven by the buzzword du jour, “agents”, which to my cynical eye really do show possibility of radically changing the shape of the industry. That’s certainly what I heard across a dozen panels.

These two advancing patterns point to a few efficiencies coming to the space, first on the media side. Curation and various SPO tactics have helped to ensure buyers maximize the value of their budgets. With the influx of CTV inventory to environments curation operates on, these efficiencies can scale across more of the media space. It’s a big win for addressable and for buyers.

Secondly, agentic models hold real promise in making agency media planners the many-armed Shiva’s of optimization the hold co’s have sought to mould. That leads to my final observation of Cannes – I think the agency raison d’etre seems a lot more certain than in years past. Meta may promise to make the ads with AI and leave marketers just rubber stamping checks, but the agency as orchestrator across a growing range of walled gardens seems a sturdy moat.

One big theme at Cannes Lions this year was the evolution of CTV, bringing the video format pharma has come to know and love on linear, into a privacy-safe, measurable, one-to-one targeting environment.

Measurement came up a lot too. In the “Clicks, Conversions, and Scripts – Oh My” panel that included our Datavant partners at PurpleLab and LiveRamp, the message was clear: start with the outcome you care about like audience quality, channel optimization, new patient starts or total scripts written — and work backwards. You need to understand the ultimate outcome metric you want and then assess how your measurement setup can capture this.

You need data for that and it wouldn’t be Cannes without mentioning clean rooms! Clean rooms are helping break down walled gardens, letting us connect more data points like impressions, engagement, pixel data from landing pages, etc. Major partnership announcements and clean rooms are enabling access to even more than was available 1 to 2 years ago. While the walled gardens made media mix modeling and multi-touch attribution a lot harder over the years, clean rooms are taking us back in a direction where the walls aren’t so tall anymore.

And with all this data, brands and their agencies want more control to experiment, model, and optimize on their own terms. You can tinker to find what is right for the outcomes most important to you. The end goal? Smarter, more efficient performance. Getting back to CTV, the efficiency from this channel is allowing challenger brands to get into video inventory without being limited to broad based linear buys.