Innovation in 2026: What the Solli Roundtable Revealed About the New Wave of Pharma Media

PurpleLab's VP of Strategic Partnerships Ted Sweetser joined a panel of senior leaders from across pharma, media, data and publishing for a closed roundtable hosted by solli. The conversation covered AI and media planning, measurement, compliance and emerging media opportunities. What came out of it was a candid, practical discussion about how innovation is already reshaping the way pharma reaches patients and HCPs, and what brands need to do to keep up.

Here are the key takeaways:

AI Is the Great Equalizer

Perhaps the clearest theme to emerge was that AI is fundamentally redistributing access to knowledge. For patients, that means being able to start health conversations in plain language, where they can describe basic symptoms without needing clinical vocabulary and get personalized responses that make sense to them. For HCPs, it means synthesizing journals and streamlining administrative workflows. AI is also narrowing the knowledge gap between clinician and patient.

For pharma marketers, this evolution means patient audiences are better informed and more empowered when entering clinical conversations. But it also means more misinformation is circulating. A significant proportion of AI-generated health responses are pulled from sources like Reddit, X and Wikipedia rather than peer-reviewed studies or medical societies. Brands need to be anchored to sources of truth and actively working to ensure their information is accurate and credible in the environments these models draw from.

Replacing Search with Conversation

Traditional search is changing shape. Patient-facing websites are seeing dramatic drops in traffic as more users turn to conversational AI interfaces to begin their health journeys. Therefore, SEO strategy needs to be reimagined to ensure content is clean and citable so that LLMs can pull from it. The panel agreed that brand marketing has thus become the new SEO.

Pharma brands that want to remain visible in this new environment need to think beyond links and rankings, and start thinking about how they show up inside conversations.

The Impatient, Empowered Patient

The demographics of the health consumer are also changing. Today’s pharma patient skews older and may be slower to adopt AI tools. But the younger generation is already AI-native, and will increasingly expect instant digestible responses that are fully personalized to them. Pharma brands should expect the pressure to deliver faster and more relevant information to only intensify.

At the same time, the roundtable highlighted a rise in opt-in users – patients and caregivers who are proactively seeking out content and services tailored to their health journey. These are highly receptive audiences who are willing to engage with brand content precisely because they know it will be relevant to where they are. For pharma marketers, this represents a meaningful opportunity to engage earlier in the journey, before the first clinical interaction, with content that genuinely meets patients where they are.

Data Stewardship Is the New Competitive Advantage

One of the strongest points raised during the roundtable was the accelerating focus on data ownership and stewardship. Across pharma and life sciences, brands are increasingly prioritizing the ability to own, maintain and continuously interrogate their historical performance data, rather than outsourcing that function. The ability to compound learnings over time and to build a reliable internal source of truth, is becoming a strategic priority.

This is an area where PurpleLab’s capabilities are directly relevant. As brands look to understand performance across complex patient journeys, having a robust data partner is critical.

Meaningful Outcomes Over Vanity Metrics

Clicks and CTR still have a role, but the roundtable was clear that they no longer tell the full story. In pharma, the most relevant outcomes, such as new patient starts, adherence, qualified reach and brand lift, unfold over long timeframes. The challenge for measurement is not to replace familiar metrics, but to layer them within a more complete picture of performance that captures influence as well as interaction, and connects media activity to real patient impact.

Pharma continues to grapple with fragmentation in how measurement is defined and reported, but in areas like identity resolution, device graphing and mapping complex longitudinal journeys, it may already be further ahead, especially with the right measurement partner. The next phase is building on these strengths for increased optimization.