Sarah Moss
February 4, 2026
11
minutes read
Pharma TV marketing is evolving fast as privacy limits tighten and digital-first approaches stall. In this article, we’ll explain how TV can anchor omnichannel efforts and still be measured credibly.
If you run U.S. pharma marketing, you already know the paradox: you’re expected to prove business outcomes while operating inside some of the strictest privacy and regulatory boundaries in advertising. Meanwhile, your audience spans wildly different viewing behaviors—patients, caregivers, and HCPs do not move through the journey in one neat funnel.
Here’s the bet we’re making: TV is the closest thing pharma has to a “shared layer” across the journey. Not because it’s magical, but because it still delivers reach at scale, it’s increasingly addressable through streaming, and it can be measured in privacy-safe ways that align with how pharma outcomes are defined (scripts, new-to-brand starts, adherence, and follow-up actions).
⚡ Omnichannel isn’t more channels. It’s one system that behaves predictably.
From there, we can rebuild omnichannel around TV as the backbone—then connect digital, search, and point-of-care into a plan that behaves like a single operating model.
Omnichannel in pharma is often described as orchestrated, personalized, and consistent. The reality is more constrained—and more interesting.
The United States is one of the only countries that permits direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising at scale, alongside New Zealand. That single fact changes the media math, because awareness and education aren’t optional add-ons; they’re a core growth lever.
Healthcare and pharma advertising is large and still expanding. EMARKETER estimated ~$30B in U.S. healthcare + pharma ad spending in 2024, with digital continuing to take share. By late 2025, EMARKETER reported pharma TV ad spending reached ~$5.4B through November 2025 (surpassing 2024’s full-year ~$5.1B), based on iSpot data.
Those numbers matter for one reason: TV is not behaving like a legacy channel in pharma budgets. It’s still a primary investment, even as teams talk “digital-first.”
Nielsen’s Gauge showed streaming hit 44.8% of total TV usage in May 2025, edging past broadcast + cable combined for the first time. Then Nielsen’s Ad Supported Gauge found ad-supported viewing accounted for 72.9% of overall TV viewing in Q3 2025, with streaming representing a large chunk of ad-supported time.
Translation: “TV” is now a blended environment—linear still delivers scale, while streaming delivers incremental reach, household-level delivery, and new measurement surfaces.
In September 2025, HHS and FDA announced actions and messaging focused on prescription drug ad transparency and enforcement, with FDA also publicizing a crackdown on deceptive drug advertising. Whether or not any specific policy direction sticks long-term, the implication is immediate: pharma marketers need better proof, tighter substantiation, and cleaner measurement.
Key takeaways (reality check):
That reality sets up the next question: if digital keeps growing, why do so many digital-first pharma strategies stall?
💡 For a primer on trends shaping up in 2026, see the dedicated report: 2026 media trends.
Digital-first works—until it doesn’t. In pharma, the ceiling tends to show up in three places: privacy, saturation, and missing the “shared layer” of the journey.
Pharma can’t treat health data like retail data, and it can’t behave like a typical performance advertiser without triggering compliance and consumer trust issues. AdExchanger summarized the core tension well: pharma struggles with targeting and measurement because patient data is highly regulated, and condition-based targeting can feel invasive.
At the broader advertising level, signal loss and privacy legislation continue to tighten the learning loop. IAB’s State of Data 2024 reported that 95% of data decision-makers expected continued legislation and signal loss, and 3 in 4 expected reduced ability to collect integral consumer data.
Digital-first plans often assume they can “optimize their way out” of weak performance. In pharma, you frequently cannot observe enough to optimize safely.
Search and social are powerful for capturing existing intent. But pharma demand creation still relies heavily on education, awareness, and memory—especially for chronic conditions and categories where patients aren’t actively shopping.
EMARKETER noted that pharma’s digital spend skews toward paid search, and also pointed to how difficult it is to drive “offline” outcomes like prescriptions from digital interactions alone. When digital is optimized primarily for clicks, it can miss the mid-funnel work that creates future intent.
The patient journey isn’t one device, one platform, or one decision-maker.
A digital-first plan can end up as a set of platform-specific tactics with no consistent narrative thread. TV, for all its imperfections, is often the only channel that delivers shared context at population scale.
⚡ Digital can be precise. TV can be shared. Pharma needs both.
So if digital-first hits a ceiling, what does TV actually do across the journey—beyond “awareness”?
💡 For more context on reliable metrics and the impact of walled gardens, see: Why your marketing metrics are lying about growth & Walled gardens: The hidden cost for digital advertisers
TV works in pharma because it can do three jobs at once:
iSpot’s 2024 transparency report puts hard numbers on the baseline: prescription pharma advertisers invested over $5.15B in linear TV ads in 2024, delivering 413B impressions across 271 brands. This is not a channel pharma is “moving on” from. It’s a channel pharma is re-instrumenting.
Before we break out linear, CTV, and addressable, it helps to map where TV contributes across the journey.
💡 For a primer on broader TV advertising, see: What is television advertising? Key benefits and disadvantages in 2025
⚡ Almost everyone has seen prescription drug ads, which is exactly why TV remains a behavior-shaping channel in the U.S. The point is not that TV reaches “everyone”; it’s that TV creates shared awareness faster than most digital-first plans can.
Linear is still the fastest path to broad, repeated exposure in a regulated category. It also gives pharma a familiar set of buying patterns (dayparts, networks, tentpole programming) and an environment that tends to be perceived as more “mainstream” than many digital placements.
iSpot also noted a concentration dynamic: over 52% of national TV pharma spend went into just five networks in 2024. That implies two things:
Where linear shines:
Where linear strains:
💡 For a primer on linear & CTV, see the guide: CTV vs linear TV
CTV is not “digital video on a TV screen.” It behaves differently because it blends:
The macro trend is obvious: IAB reported digital video ad spend grew 18% in 2024 to $64B and was projected to reach $72B in 2025, with digital video expected to capture nearly 60% of total TV/video ad spend in 2025. Pharma doesn’t need to follow every macro trend—but these shifts expand inventory, tooling, and measurement options that pharma can use.
How pharma uses CTV well:
A useful detail from iSpot: weight-loss brands like Zepbound used streaming first to test messaging before expanding to linear. That’s a modern pattern: treat streaming as a faster creative feedback loop, then scale what works.
💡 For context on CTV, please see: Connected TV advertising in 2025
Addressable TV is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean “target people with condition X.” In pharma, it usually means:
Addressable becomes especially valuable when:
And because so much TV viewing is ad-supported (as mentioned previously), the practical opportunity is large.
💡 For context on addressable TV and differences between CTV and addressable, see explainers: Addressable advertising in 2026 & CTV or addressable TV
Measuring TV in pharma is not about finding a perfect attribution model. It’s about building a stack of evidence that holds up under privacy constraints and reflects how pharma outcomes happen.
A practical measurement system usually includes four layers:
AdExchanger’s reporting on Blockgraph and Datavant describes the direction of travel: use clean room approaches to match de-identified claims data with anonymized TV exposure data to measure outcomes like script lift, without enabling household-level targeting based on claims.
⚡ If TV can drive real-world actions, you should expect to see it in outcomes like doctor conversations and prescription behavior, not just site traffic. In a KFF poll, a meaningful share of adults said they talked to a doctor about a medicine they saw advertised, and many reported receiving that prescription.
This matters because it aligns measurement with pharma’s real outcome language:
A TV measurement plan is usually stronger when it includes:
If your organization is still relying on last-click style thinking, TV will look worse than it is, because TV does not behave like a click channel.
One reason this conversation is intensifying is the broader data environment: as noted earlier, IAB found widespread expectation of ongoing signal loss and reduced ability to collect consumer data.
TV measurement in pharma is evolving not because it’s trendy, but because it’s one of the few places where privacy-safe outcome linkage is becoming more standardized.
💡 On TV/CTV measurement approaches, see: How to measure TV advertising ROI & CTV measurement: The key metrics
When TV becomes the backbone, three things change: planning, creative, and organizational behavior.
Instead of asking, “How much CTV should we buy?” you ask:
This shift turns TV from a blunt instrument into a sequencing and reinforcement engine.
Pharma creative often has to carry a lot: condition framing, benefits, safety balance, support programs, and brand trust signals.
A TV-led system encourages:
iSpot’s 2024 report highlights how brands are evolving creative and cross-platform strategy, including examples of streaming-led testing before scaling.
Here’s the underappreciated advantage: once you set up TV measurement that connects to outcomes, teams stop arguing about platform vanity metrics and start aligning on the same scorecard.
The above-mentioned Blockgraph–Datavant approach described by AdExchanger is a good example of what “system-level” measurement aims for: connecting anonymized exposure to de-identified claims-based outcome reporting, focused on measurement rather than sensitive targeting.
Imagine a category launch where:
Even without perfect attribution, you now have a system where:
⚡ When TV is the backbone, digital stops carrying the whole weight.
A rebuild doesn’t start with an upfront plan. It starts with operating principles, then media architecture, then measurement design.
Pick one primary job for TV per major initiative:
The mistake is trying to do all three at once in every spot.
A practical architecture usually includes:
iSpot’s 2024 data makes the case that the industry is already moving toward cross-platform strategies as streaming momentum grows.
If TV is the backbone, digital becomes the handoff:
This is where most omnichannel breaks today: TV says one thing, digital assumes a different intent state.
Because a huge share of viewing is ad-supported (as mentioned previously), your plan can drift into over-frequency quietly. Use addressable and CTV to manage:
At minimum:
And remember: IAB’s 2024 findings suggest the data environment will not get simpler. Build for constraint.
A TV-led omnichannel model tends to fail when:
Governance fixes that:
With the operating model clear, the natural next question is how teams actually run this without drowning in dashboards and inconsistent reporting.
A TV-led omnichannel model adds moving parts fast. The risk is building an analytics project instead of an operating system that helps teams make decisions.
AI Digital is built for that reality. The model is DSP-agnostic, designed to reduce “walled garden” blind spots, and structured around transparent execution and outcome-led optimization.
Here are a few practical ways AI Digital helps pharma make TV omnichannel-ready.
Major platforms restrict cross-channel visibility, which makes TV + digital coordination harder than it should be. AI Digital’s Open Garden framework is positioned as a neutral alternative, built to unify performance insights across channels instead of keeping them siloed.
Open Garden is designed to support:
Running TV-led omnichannel means you need consistent planning and optimization across channels, not separate playbooks. AI Digital’s managed service covers end-to-end execution and explicitly includes CTV and OTT within a broader cross-channel mix.
TV-led omnichannel lives or dies on inventory quality, especially in regulated categories where brand safety and transparency matter. Smart Supply is AI Digital’s supply-side approach focused on:
Elevate is AI Digital’s intelligence platform that combines AI recommendations with human oversight, with a focus on cross-platform insight.
For pharma teams building TV-led omnichannel, the most relevant parts are:
💡 Related POV: Elevate by AI Digital leads the industry shift with transparent, AI-powered media intelligence
All of this supports the broader point of the article: TV becomes more powerful in pharma when it’s planned as part of a measurable system, not treated as a standalone line item.
Pharma marketing doesn’t need another channel trend. It needs a backbone.
TV—linear for scale, CTV for modern delivery, and addressable for control—can provide that backbone because it creates shared context across the journey and supports privacy-safe measurement approaches that align with pharma outcomes. Meanwhile, digital can do what it does best: capture and educate intent, and support the handoffs that TV initiates.
In 2026, the winners won’t be the teams that buy the most CTV. They’ll be the teams that build the cleanest system: one narrative, one architecture, one measurement stack, one governance model.
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TV creates broad, shared awareness and makes the message memorable, while digital captures and deepens intent—search, landing pages, and HCP/patient resources handle the next steps. The key is consistency: align the TV claim language with what people will search, send them to a page that matches the promise, and use CTV or retargeting to reinforce the message without overserving the same creative.
Linear TV is strongest for fast scale and mass education, especially for launches and category framing. CTV is effective for incremental reach and sequencing messages to different audience segments over time. Addressable TV is most useful for frequency control and rotating creative variations by non-sensitive proxies like geography or life stage, which helps reduce fatigue and improve efficiency.
AI helps by turning fragmented signals into actionable decisions—choosing the next best message, pacing spend across channels, and spotting where the journey is breaking (for example, strong reach but weak follow-through). It’s most valuable when it supports governance, forecasting, and continuous optimization rather than simply producing more dashboards.
Start with one shared audience definition and one core narrative, then build a simple handoff: TV drives to search and a dedicated landing experience, digital reinforces the same message and answers the “what now?” questions, and measurement ties exposure to agreed outcomes using a small set of KPIs. If you only do one thing, make sure the TV message and the landing page feel like the same conversation.
Pharma TV marketing is the use of linear TV, CTV, and addressable TV to build awareness, educate patients and caregivers, and reinforce brand confidence at scale. It still matters because pharmaceutical advertising often needs shared, trusted context before people search, ask a doctor, or take the next step.
TV in pharma marketing can prime patient conversations, which often changes the quality of HCP engagement in the exam room, even if the media wasn’t targeted to clinicians. When paired with aligned HCP resources and field materials, TV helps create continuity between what patients ask and what providers can confidently discuss.
The most common mistake is treating TV as “awareness only” and digital as “performance,” then measuring them with incompatible KPIs. Pharmaceutical advertising works better when TV creates demand and memory while digital captures and educates that demand, using one shared outcome hierarchy.
