The Case for Measuring Actual Human Impact in Pharma Media

This article is part of solli’s August series exploring Metrics and Measurement.  

Thanks to a deluge of data and advanced technologies, pharma media has undergone a shift in recent years in which the measurement of campaign success has expanded far beyond near-term, easily quantified metrics. 

So-called “vanity metrics” like impressions, views and clicks have given way to deeper-reaching KPIs like audience quality, to calculate whether a campaign is actually reaching a target audience, and script lift, as a proxy for a campaign’s clinical impact. 

There’s an argument to be made, however, that measurement should go even deeper—that even AQ and script lift stop short of demonstrating whether a campaign is materially impacting patients’ health outcomes. 

Indeed, the idea has come up several times in solli’s discussions with leaders in the pharma media industry. In an early episode of the solli Sessions podcast, for example, one speaker described how marketers would significantly benefit from the ability to “measure real change over time,” in terms of the less quantitative shifts that can occur in culture, behavior and understanding.  

And in a solli Sessions discussion last year, Olivier Chateau, co-founder and CEO of Health Union, suggested that pharma media’s supreme success metric should move beyond audience quality to focus more on how a campaign may affect the actions of the individual humans who make up those target audiences. 

In another interview with solli this month, Chateau dug even further into the concept, offering up a case for why pharma marketers must acknowledge the shortcomings of the industry’s go-to quantitative metrics and prioritize more qualitative factors instead. 

Passive vs. active audiences 

Audience quality is regularly hailed as the most important criterion in measuring the success of a pharma campaign, as “the only KPI that matters.”  

It certainly has its merits, as an indicator of whether marketing materials are actually reaching their intended audiences, who may then be influenced to take some sort of action related to the messaging—though it stops short of directly attributing such actions to a particular campaign. 

“I think what has happened over the last five, seven years is that with the access to healthcare data, the ability to be smarter and better in general, audience quality has become the default because it was a leading indicator to the right things,” Chateau said. “But it doesn’t really give you any details as to what is the mindset of the people, be it physicians when you do a physician campaign or patients on the patient side.” 

As he pointed out, AQ will equate a verified individual who engages with an ad while visiting a patient community website with one who’s reached programmatically on a site wholly unrelated to their health condition—“and the reality is, they are not at all the same.” 

Put another way, a more “passive” patient whose health condition is well-managed and who is exposed to a pharma ad related to that condition may contribute to a high AQ for the campaign, but they’re much less likely to take a related action than a patient who comes across an ad while actively looking for care management, treatment options or community and support resources. 

“So, the question becomes: How do you identify people that are highly engaged in the condition who are likely to take action that could drive value for your brand and, quite frankly, value for patients?” Chateau said. 

A potentially better measure of campaign success, then, would be “active AQ” or “engaged AQ,” and the executive pointed to individuals who are active in patient communities like Health Union’s as an example of where those highly engaged audiences most likely to act on brand messaging can be found. 

That said, he noted that the ongoing movement from standard search engines to artificial intelligence-based searches—many of which, research shows, end in zero clicks at all—will make measuring the true impact of campaigns even more difficult. As marketing efforts morph from drawing visitors to a designated website to garnering mentions within responses from the likes of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, metrics of actual engagement become even cloudier. 

Measuring trust 

Looking even further afield than metrics like AQ, another thing “really bothering” Chateau is the industry’s continued focus almost solely on quantitative measurements, especially as health and pharma brands place more and more of a premium on qualitative concepts like building trust among patients and healthcare professionals in the age of AI. 

“You never really, in measurement today, say, ‘Did this brand in this environment increase the trust that I have in that brand?’” he said.  

But that could soon change. Though Chateau acknowledged the challenges of conducting qualitative assessments, especially as such metrics are not currently readily available to media teams, he predicted that existing tools like awareness, trial and usage (ATU) surveys will start to be integrated into pharma media functions to help measure campaign success. 

“Measurement has made a tremendous amount of progress. It used to be difficult and expensive; it has become more affordable and more mainstream,” he said. “But now it’s going to have to change and evolve again so that it includes some ability to understand, ‘Are these patients, in the context of my brand, the right people?’” 

He pointed again to online patient communities as an example of where brands have a greater chance of capturing trust and engagement through ad placements, since visitors to such sites are better primed to receive and act upon health-related messaging than if they encountered the same ad while, say, checking the weather. 

Putting the pieces together 

Overall, the ability to calculate more nebulous concepts like trust and action in the context of a marketing campaign is becoming increasingly crucial as pharmas expand their work in smaller markets like rare disease and oncology—where the task at hand is to capture attention and change the behavior of just hundreds or even dozens of patients, making true engagement and brand trust more important than ever. 

Advancements in technology and data access are helping to improve media sophistication and audience segmentation. But, according to Chateau, “the context by which it then gets delivered is even more important.” 

Marketers will therefore need to look even more closely at how and where they’re reaching patients to foster actual engagement.  

That practice may vary by channel: Uber-popular formats like linear and connected TV, for example, have the potential to reach vast swaths of target audiences, but it’s nearly impossible to directly link a patient or HCP’s specific action to a TV ad, so brands will need to reckon with how to generate qualitative measures from such channels. 

In other areas, it may simply be a matter of tapping into the vast amount of data now available to brand teams. Something as simple as connecting AQ to HCP visits, for example, could create a new metric that more clearly illustrates a campaign’s real-world impact, Chateau noted. 

“The pharma companies, with AI, are going to get more and more sophisticated. They’re going to be able to ingest data for media more than ever before, and they’re going to be able to run their own measurement,” he said. “And when that day comes—I don’t know if it’s two years, three years, five years from now—they will be able to actually do all this work and analysis. I don’t know how quick it’s going to happen, but it will happen.” 

When it comes to solving the puzzle of measuring true human impact from pharma campaigns, the pieces are all within reach. For marketers, it’s now just a matter of putting them all together to redefine what quality measurement really means. 

For more on Metrics and Measurement, click here.