TV Isn’t One Channel Anymore — Why Pharma Measurement Has to Evolve Too
For decades, TV has been the backbone of pharma advertising. It offers something every marketer wants; namely scale, attention, and credibility. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is how people watch.
Today, TV is no longer a single channel. It’s a collection of viewing environments – linear, streaming, connected TV and on-demand – and audiences move fluidly across all of them. For pharma marketers, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge is that traditional TV planning was built for a simpler world. Broad demographic buys and time-of-day strategies made sense when viewing was more predictable. However, in healthcare, “reaching people” is not the same as reaching the right people. The opportunity is that data now makes it possible to connect planning, activation, and measurement around the same audience, driving measurable outcomes.
The business case for getting TV campaigns right has never been stronger: across 17 major pharma DTC brands analyzed by the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), collective U.S. TV investment grew from $1.6 billion in 2021 to $3.3 billion in 2024 – more than doubling in just three years – while combined U.S. sales revenue rose from $37.6 billion to $86.8 billion over the same period.
Audience Consistency Is Key
In healthcare, audience definition is everything. A campaign built around a broad demographic may generate impressions, but that alone does not tell a marketer whether they reached patients with a specific condition – or healthcare professionals who influence prescribing behavior.
According to the VAB, 78% of U.S. adults – over 200 million people – currently suffer or have recently suffered from a medical ailment, a figure that has grown by 16.4 million since 2021. This is an enormous potential audience, but only targeted and well-measured campaigns can reach the right patients within it.
That’s why the most effective TV strategies in pharma are increasingly audience-based from the start. The same audience should guide:
- Planning - deciding who to target
- Activation - buying media against that audience across linear and streaming environments
- Measurement - evaluating whether the right people were reached and whether the campaign directly influenced prescribing behavior
When the audience definition is consistent across the full campaign lifecycle, marketers can compare performance more precisely and reduce wasted spend. Ultimately, this helps ensure that educational messages reach the patients and providers who can benefit most from them.
Measuring Beyond Reach and Frequency
Reach and frequency still have a place, but they are not enough on their own. For pharma, instead of measuring success based on impressions or, “Did we get enough eyeballs?”, the question should be, “Did we engage our ideal audiences at key intervals, and did the campaign motivate an action?”
Consumer behavior backs this up. Adults are significantly more likely to get information about treatment remedies from TV ads than from any other media – 5x more likely than from magazine ads, 3x more likely than from direct mail, 2x more likely than from social media, and 47% more likely than from health websites or apps. Crucially, this holds true across all age groups, including adults 18 to 49.
Additionally, TV exposure translates into concrete action. Among heavy TV viewers, 39% took some form of action after seeing a healthcare ad – and they were 56% more likely to have discussed an ad with their doctor, 29% more likely to have asked their doctor to prescribe a specific drug, and 21% more likely to have visited a product or drug website than the average adult.
In this regard, healthcare-specific measurement is essential. Instead of relying only on general media metrics, marketers can evaluate performance through outcomes that reflect real-world health behavior, such as:
- Audience quality - Of the people exposed, how many are actually relevant to the condition or therapy area?
- Script lift - Did exposure correlate with increases in prescriptions or diagnosis-qualified activity?
- Script metrics - Did the campaign influence prescribing behavior?
- HCP and patient engagement - Were the right professionals and consumers reached in the right environments?
Why Pharma Measurement Is Different
Measurement in healthcare is more complex than in many other verticals. For consumer brands, broad audience buying and standard performance metrics often work well enough. However, pharma campaigns operate in a much more regulated environment. They depend on offline indicators like claims, prescriptions, doctor visits, and treatment behaviors – all of which are harder to connect to media exposure.
That means measurement in pharma has to work backward from outcomes. Marketers need to start with the result they care about – for example, prescription lift or HCP visits – and then connect that back to audience quality and media exposure. Without that connective tissue, it’s easy to end up measuring disconnected data sets that don’t tell the full story.
The data shows that when brands do invest consistently in TV, the mid-funnel impact is measurable and significant. In a VAB analysis of 16 pharma DTC TV advertisers, 88% saw their highest branded search volume occur once their TV campaign launched. In one well-known example, Ozempic more than doubled its branded online search queries in the week its first TV campaign aired.
It’s also why healthcare TV advertising benefits from advanced audience buying. When media is activated around healthcare-specific segments rather than broad proxies, campaigns are more likely to reach and influence the intended audience.
Where PurpleLab Fits In
PurpleLab helps solve one of the biggest challenges in healthcare media: turning real-world health data into usable audience and measurement intelligence.
The way we see it, healthcare advertisers don’t just need more data. They need better data, organized in a way that is actionable across planning, activation, and measurement.
PurpleLab supports that by bringing real-world health insights into TV campaigns so advertisers can:
- Plan around the right patients and HCPs
- Activate consistently across linear, streaming and digital video
- Measure whether exposure translated into real-world outcomes
PurpleLab also helps marketers work with distinct audience types. Patient audiences and HCP audiences are not interchangeable, and the creative strategy and messaging should not be either. The more precise the audience, the more relevant the message. And the more relevant the message, the more likely the campaign is to produce results.
TV is Still Invaluable – But Only If You Measure It Correctly
TV, whether linear, addressable, or CTV delivers attention and scale in a way few other channels can, and this value is amplified when it’s tied to real-world measurement. TV is no longer a static buy, but instead part of a measurable system that can accelerate success and drive greater outcomes.
