Advertising in pharmaceuticals is notoriously challenging. Regulations vary by region, and products geared toward consumers versus health care professionals require different strategies. But spending in the category is expected to grow as pharmaceutical advertisers embrace digital marketing.¹ Quality controls are paramount for a category targeting pre-qualified audiences in premium inventory. The Trade Desk’s latest platform update offers brands a prescription for quality through several new platform solutions.
Pharma advertisers spent $17 billion on digital ads in 2023, and are expected to increase their investments 17%, to $20 billion, by 2025.¹ And at the start of ’23, they increased audio (podcast) spending by 208%, showing a willingness to press into newer channels.²
This impressive growth comes with opportunities and challenges. First, it’s important for pharmaceutical and health care brands to minimize duplication and waste by choosing partners with the greatest reach among desired audiences.
Second, these brands should consider dialing in their quality controls. This means making sure their ad creative is showing up in premium environments and targeting qualified audiences.
Kokai, our latest platform upgrade, offers many ways to help you buy inventory with efficiency and quality in mind. Below we summarize three of them.
Prescription for Quality:
1. Improve audience strategy with pharma-specific data sources
For instance, pharma advertisers can use our baked-in AI, Koa™, to optimize campaigns toward the audience quality of measurement providers like IQVIA.
This allows you to use this as a primary source of truth, which can help you reach more of the right audiences across the open internet, as well as optimize toward top-performing data partners.
2. Utilize the Quality Reach Index
To help you further maximize qualified unique reach and enhance campaign performance, our Quality Reach Index (QRI) report offers a suitable early measure of audience quality. QRI gives you mid- and post-campaign insights to help you evaluate the relevance of your targeting strategies toward an audience seed that you define.
A seed ideally begins with your most valuable asset: first-party data. Seed data can come from consented CRM, surveys, or web converters. If you don’t have first-party data on hand, you can build a seed using one of our industry-specific, third-party data providers.
Once you have defined your campaign’s seed, the QRI measures relevance scores by comparing your target audience’s engagement with the broader population, providing a clear indicator of how well your audience segments align with your core customers.
For instance, a relevance score of 90 indicates that your audience is 90 times more likely to engage with a specific publisher compared to the average internet user.
Follow these steps to get started:
- Choose your campaign seed: Define your target audience using existing customer data or other data source.
- Run your campaign: Launch your campaign as usual to establish a performance baseline.
- Analyze your relevance: Use QRI to pull reports and assess targeting effectiveness.
- Test something new: Use insights for immediate relevance feedback and encourage further testing.
3. Optimize for the most premium publishers and placements
Quality curation begins with choosing the right media partners. The Trade Desk offers two inventory solutions for pharma brands to minimize their exposure on nonpremium inventory sources and increase cross-channel efficiencies.
The Sellers and Publishers 500+ is a curated marketplace of more than 500 premium publishers, giving you access to the highest-quality impressions across the open internet. Focusing your buy on our Sellers and Publishers 500+ helps ads appear in quality inventory sources via premium publishers and placements.
In a similar vein, OpenPath is a direct integration with premium publishers that removes intermediaries and aims to offer transparent, efficient access to advertising inventory. OpenPath can help simplify the supply chain, reduce costs, and provide clear visibility into the value of each impression.
Try our multipronged quality tools
Kokai offers a number of ways to help you work toward increasing the quality of your campaigns through relevant reach and premium content. By optimizing toward your ideal audiences, using the QRI for targeting effectiveness, and working toward brand-safe advertising with the Sellers and Publishers 500+ as well as OpenPath, you can connect with more of the right consumers in premium environments.
To learn more about all of the capabilities available to you through Kokai, check out our collection of articles and insights on the Resource Desk. Not yet a client with The Trade Desk? Contact us today to step into the future of media buying.