The Promise of Programmatic Advertising for HCPs

Posted by miccor01 on January 9th, 2017

Programmatic advertising is the automation of the decision-making process of digital media buying most typically combined with targeting highly specific audiences and demographics. This form of ad buying, while mainstream in consumer and even most B2B digital ad buying, is now finally being evaluated and adopted in the professional healthcare market. HCP programmatic is creating a valuable opportunity for many healthcare and pharma companies to advertise their products and services to a highly targeted audience of healthcare professionals on a wide range of websites, mobile devices, social networks and even addressable TV.  Interestingly, in a recent survey conducted by MedData Group, the majority of HCPs reported that they would be very likely to engage with online advertisements about CME, followed by those containing drug information, healthcare technology, career opportunities and other content.

Programmatic has had slower adoption in the professional healthcare realm for good reason.  Similar to social platforms and even email before that, any new medium presents compliance and even privacy concerns. Pharma, other companies and the agencies representing them are starting to feel much more comfortable with these issues and how to address them with the right data.  The promise of programmatic is in allowing greater reach and frequency to a highly targeted universe of key prescribers or other characteristics and with higher ROI by being able to lower the effective CPM when compared with more site-specific campaigns.  Beyond the bottom line, advertisers can gain scalability, flexibility, detailed targeting and overall campaign efficiency.

Perhaps self-serving given our business here at MedData Group, but the ‘fuel’ if you will, to realizing the promise of HCP programmatic is the right data. Executing a programmatic digital campaign that both reaches the right HCPs and remains compliant, requires an ability to target individual HCPs right down to the NPI level.  This turns out to be reasonably complex to accomplish while ensuring the ultimate relationship between the HCP NPI number, all the way to cookie or tag ID at your DSP (Demand Side Platform) is reliably one-to-one.  We can draw many parallels to HCP email marketing that so many of us utilize in our multi-channel campaigns.  With email, by working with reputable vendors and understanding their data, you can trust that the NPI to email address relationship is one-to-one and accurate. Your expectations cannot be any different from this when it comes to the data you use to power your programmatic targeting.

MedData Group has worked hard to provide the largest database of HCPs linked to highly accurate digital IDs.  With our data, you gain targeting down to the NPI level, highly effective campaign reach and coverage, and the confidence that you will remain compliant in your messaging.

We’d love to hear from you about how our solutions can help you.  Contact me today with your questions, comments and feedback or contact sales directly at: [email protected] or call (978)-887-0039.