The Omnichallenge of Omnichannel Engagement: Reaching HCPs Outside of a Professional Context

For pharma marketers, agency strategy leads, and healthcare media owners, the concept of omnichannel engagement is not just a buzzword but a strategic North Star. It’s about creating a seamless journey for a customer, enabling the brand to interact, inform, and educate, all with the ultimate goal of boosting brand affinity and driving sales.
Unless you’re a US-based human reading this article, engaging with HCPs has been restricted (due to compliance regulations) to engagements in a ‘professional context’, where platforms have restricted access to HCPs only or are professional/clinical contexts, leaving significant gaps in the digital strategy.

The Digital Journey of HCPs

Research from M3 demonstrated that HCPs in the UK spend about 50% of their digital lives in a professional context. But what about that other 50%? Outside the US, white space starts to emerge for pharma marketers and their customers. This research alludes to the daily digital journey of an HCP and the importance of being present in both contexts, given the time split between professional and non-professional contexts.

Social Media has helped fill the gap, but regulations are strict. Pharma companies can’t communicate about brands with an HCP in a ‘public’ forum, especially with the capability to ‘like’, comment, and share/repost content, inadvertently expanding its reach beyond a clearly defined intended audience.

Programmatic Advertising in Europe

European Healthcare programmatic advertising has, until recently, lagged far behind the capabilities of consumer media brands and technology platforms and what Pharma can execute in the US market, where there are different regulations in place and a richer source of data to target HCP.

Healthcare programmatic advertising has finally reached the shores of Europe in a big way in the last 2-3 years, with ad networks emerging to solve the ongoing ‘omnichallenge’ of true omnichannel engagement. There are two styles of programmatic networks available to European pharma today. The first one that became available is through Endemic networks, i.e. advertising within a relevant context for the user, buying that audience based on context and relevance. The second type is through Non-endemic networks, i.e. serving ads in an unrelated context but targeting based on data that identifies the recipient of the ad before it is delivered, but this hasn’t been an option for European pharmaceutical companies until now.

Earlier this year, Medscape, in conjunction with our sister company PulsePoint, released the first even non-endemic programmatic technology for European marketers targeting HCPs called Medscape Extend.

Extend offers a new frontier for pharma companies to engage with their customers outside a professional context with greater control of the message distribution (no sharing or commenting here!), potential for sophisticated targeting, and certainty of the audience. It has the potential to ‘fill the white space’ between professional interactions, not just repeat what pharma already does today.

Medscape Extend’s Role in European Programmatic Advertising

Adding this new dynamic to the omnichannel journey for an HCP unlocks new potential for pharma marketers and their agency partners to develop fully inclusive customer journeys that cross the divide from professional to personal interactions. Messaging that is educational in nature, brand-building, or even corporate positioning creates more touchpoints that unlock greater reach for the harder-to-find customer groups where professional interactions are few and far between.

Extend has the additional benefit of greater sophistication in targeting, finding a specific audience segment, and being visible at a particular time of day or in a precise geographic location. You no longer have to accept ‘Healthcare Professional’ audiences, clinical context and geography as the only targeting parameters available to you.

Using Medscape’s Global Network registration data to inform the targeting capabilities, pharma marketers can now layer on speciality information and behavioural signals from Medscape Network interactions. The proprietary data we hold on our registered audience of HCPs is not available anywhere else globally and provides a unique capability for pharma marketers to be present wherever their customers are within their digital journey.

Advanced Targeting and Future Developments

Medscape’s user data has been curated over 30 years as a digital-only medical publisher, leading the way in audience identification and segmentation within our network. Collecting name, email address, profession, specialty, country of practice and professional identification number, all painting a specific picture of each HCP using Medscape. Now, we are bringing this to pharma marketers in a brand-new channel for execution.

All this data is integrated with one of the largest, most sophisticated programmatic platforms available in the US, a sister company of Medscape called PulsePoint. PulsePoint has over a decade of expertise in programmatic advertising in the US market, with a particular capability in audience identification. The same tried-and-tested capability is used with Medscape Extend to identify ex-US HCPs and engage them outside the Medscape Global Network.

Precision Targeting in a Non-Endemic Context

This targeting sophistication starts to paint a much more precise picture of the end-user and the ad they will receive when navigating the broader internet in that Non-Endemic context.

Here’s an example of how this could look:

• Rare disease campaign: Spinal Muscular Atrophy disease awareness campaign
• Audience: Neurologists, Pediatricians, Primary Care Physicians in the EU5
• Medscape Extend targeting logic:
  • Neurology Doctors, Pediatrician Doctors, PCP Doctors only + Include ONLY HCPs from this cohort actively viewing SMA articles within the Medscape Global Network

The potential audience scope based on all Neurologists, Pediatricians, and PCPs across the EU5 could be 1M+ HCPs, stretching any budget too thin for effective reach and frequency, wasting media spend on irrelevant/uninterested HCPs, and ultimately, resulting in poor return on ad spend (ROAS). Using Medscape Extend’s targeting sophistication, we enable pharma marketers to fine-tune and filter broad audiences to a much more precise one, maximising media investment and generating better ROAS.

Medscape Extend at Medical Congresses

There are more use cases for Medscape Extend beyond the granular targeting of HCP cohorts. Amongst the most exciting executions is at medical congresses. Since the pandemic passed, congresses have risen (again) in importance and prominence for face-to-face interactions. With Extend, we can digitally activate the congress experience Pharma develops at congresses with geo-fencing capabilities that target Medscape-verified HCPs attending the congress.

For the first time in Europe, you can now serve ads to HCPs in a conference venue, knowing that only the HCP will see the ad and not the barista making the coffee for them on your conference booth. Even further than that, reaching the HCP on their shuttle bus ride to the conference centre, on the escalator at the conference centre, and even at the airport while waiting for their bag on the luggage carousel. This use of Medscape Extend creates a genuine 360-degree experience for the HCPs travelling to a congress.

Medscape Extend is unique in the rapidly expanding European HCP programmatic marketplace. While several ad networks offer HCP targeting, none have access to Medscape’s large global and local network to unlock access to our audiences. That’s not to say that Medscape Extend is the only source of data on HCPs, but it is the most complete, with a granular understanding of each HCP contained within it.

Not only can you activate your customer groups outside professional channels, but now a wholly joined-up customer journey is possible between professional and personal interactions with your customers. Our research shows that more than 50% of HCPs viewing ads in a non-endemic environment are more likely to trust a brand they see promoted on Medscape first. This demonstrates the impact programmatic advertising can have on customer experience and why Pharma should embrace this new technology. This is where Medscape is a prime choice for both the professional and non-professional interactions pharma marketers strive for.

Future Prospects for Programmatic Advertising

The programmatic marketplace is constantly evolving, and Medscape Extend won’t stand still now that it’s in the market. We intend to stay at the forefront of advancing digital advertising for pharma. With the backbone of PulsePoint to support development and targeting advancement, Extend is uniquely positioned to be at the forefront of programmatic advertising for years to come.

Our development roadmap includes initiatives like ‘follow the doctor’ and remarketing campaigns. Integrating new channels such as video and social media and a self-service platform will enable marketers to deliver campaigns across channels with complete control of the execution.

Come and join Medscape in the European programmatic revolution!

This article was written by Sam Bradford-Smith, Executive Director, Global at Medscape Global. 

For more information reach out through this link.