1. Challenge
A top 10 pharmaceutical brand worked with VDX.tv to evaluate whether tactical changes made during an active campaign could improve Audience Quality (AQ) while lowering the cost of reaching ideal patients. While campaign performance was already being reviewed regularly, the team wanted a clearer understanding of which optimization strategies were producing measurable improvements in patient alignment.
To bring greater confidence to those decisions, PurpleLab measured performance against real-world healthcare data across online video Display and Instream environments on desktop and mobile. The objective was to determine which delivery strategies were creating meaningful improvements beyond standard media reporting.
2. Approach
Two optimization strategies were tested during the campaign.
The first focused on contextual alignment. Delivery was concentrated within healthcare-focused environments where users were already engaging with medical and pharmaceutical content. The goal was to improve efficiency by reducing impressions served outside clinically relevant settings.
The second focused on engagement behavior. Users who had previously interacted with a VDX.tv ad experience were retargeted as a way to test whether engagement could serve as a stronger indicator of patient interest.
PurpleLab evaluated both strategies using healthcare data to understand how each affected verified patient reach. By measuring against de-identified patient data rather than media proxies alone, the team was able to assess whether optimization changes translated into stronger audience quality.
3. Impact / Results
The analysis showed that contextual and engagement-based optimizations improved performance in different ways, with both contributing measurable value when validated against healthcare data.
When the two strategies were used together:
- Cost per ideal patient decreased by nearly 40%
- Audience Quality increased approximately 12.5%
compared with standard delivery.
Within endemic healthcare environments alone:
- Cost per ideal patient decreased by nearly 40%
Even when Audience Quality remained similar to broader targeting approaches, the data showed that clinically aligned placements improved efficiency by reducing wasted impressions.
Engagement also proved to be a meaningful signal of patient interest. PurpleLab found that those who had previously interacted with an ad were more likely to align with the intended patient audience:
- Audience Quality increased roughly 15% in Display
- Audience Quality increased about 10% in Instream
These findings gave the campaign team a more complete view of how media decisions were affecting actual patient reach, not just campaign activity.
Takeaway
This test highlights a broader shift in pharmaceutical media optimization. Strong campaign performance is no longer defined only by clicks, engagement rates, or delivery metrics. Increasingly, marketers need to understand whether optimization decisions are improving connection to real patients.
Context can improve efficiency by reducing waste. Engagement can improve precision by identifying more relevant audiences, and measuring those signals against healthcare data provides the added confidence to understand what is truly driving performance. The result is a more informed approach to in-flight optimization — one that measures success by confirming ideal patient reach against a de-identified dataset, not by relying on media performance as a proxy alone.
