Ted Sweetser – solli sessions Season 3

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Privacy, Precision, and Performance: The Future of Pharma Media

Ted Sweetser, VP, Ad Partnerships and Strategy at PurpleLab, on data ethics, identity-free innovation, and why real-time measurement is reshaping how healthcare brands engage physicians and patients.

In this episode of solli Sessions, Ted Sweetser reflects on an unconventional career journey that’s taken him from teaching in China to ad-tech problem-solver to a key architect behind PurpleLab’s rapid growth — a company redefining how claims data powers modern healthcare marketing.

Ted shares how adaptability has shaped every career decision, why the industry’s digital transformation accelerated far beyond expectations during COVID, and how privacy, access, and patient adherence are becoming the metrics that matter most in today’s evolving media landscape.

What to expect from this episode:

• From Teacher to Technologist – How Ted’s early career abroad sparked a shift into ad tech, machine learning, and eventually healthcare data — building the technical and strategic foundation that led him to PurpleLab.
• Adaptability as a Growth Strategy – Why cross-team collaboration, experimentation, and doubling down on what works have been central to PurpleLab’s rise — and why organizations must “kill their darlings” to scale effectively.
• Digital Transformation, Accelerated – How COVID pushed pharma toward omnichannel orchestration, real-time optimization, and physician intent signals — reshaping traditional sales models and speeding the shift to digital engagement.
• Measurement That Matters – Why brands now expect fast, accurate KPIs such as audience quality, attention, and channel-level performance — and how real-time insights are becoming the new standard for campaign effectiveness.
• Beyond Impressions: Access, Affordability & Adherence – How rising barriers to care are redefining the value of media, and why measuring whether campaigns truly help patients access, afford, and stay on therapy is becoming the ultimate success metric.
• Claims Data + First-Party Relationships – Why pharma’s move toward direct-to-patient engagement requires large-scale claims intelligence to reach and understand the patients who aren’t yet in a brand’s CRM — and to build meaningful communities of care.

Whether you’re a healthcare marketer, strategist, or innovator, this episode offers an honest, forward-looking view into how data, privacy, and measurement are transforming not just media — but the way healthcare brands understand and support both physicians and patients.

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