2020 – 2024

It was March 2020. And the world was shaken by the COVID-19 lockdown. Just about every aspect of society and business was affected. For the medical advertising communications industry, this was a clarion call to underscore our relevance to a world searching for answers.

New vaccines and treatments were developed at an accelerated pace. Yet it also became clear that COVID-19 was much more than a medical challenge. It was an informational and communications challenge of the highest order.

The rapid spread of misinformation reached unprecedented levels, testing our ability to let medical science do its life-saving work. Timely and accurate communication to all audiences was necessary to address a constantly evolving global health crisis. As an industry, we had to adapt as quickly as the virus itself.

For medical communications and advertising agencies, clients not only expected but demanded new levels of accuracy, agility, creativity, and innovation. In rising to this challenge, we emerged as an essential component of the public health response, and it has forever changed our role in the healthcare ecosystem.

We changed by now expanding our spectrum of competencies beyond traditional marketing and creative. The “when, where, who, and how” of disseminating medical information became important as never before.

All aspects of the healthcare delivery system, as well as pharmaceutical research, discovery, development, distribution, and pricing, took on a more vital and visible role in society. And this underscored the value of timely and accurate scientific and medical information.

For the pharmaceutical industry, the long-standing model of person-to-person information exchange was transformed almost overnight. New, non-personal modes of communicating with providers was urgently called for. And we responded. The data-dominant age of medical communication had fully arrived.

Having made significant investments in capabilities across people, process, and technology over the previous decade, most agencies were prepared for this moment. Historically, medical marketing had been relatively slow to adapt to digital ways of working. Yet, partly spurred on by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, our industry experienced an exciting surge in innovation. Beyond being “responsible,” became “response-able.”

Among the wide array of changes that has occurred, one of the most noteworthy has been in the nature of agency ownership. As we will cover in greater detail in the “Trends” section of Medicine Avenue, private equity emerged as a new and important force, investing widely across medical advertising, education, public relations, digital marketing, and data analytics. With over 300 private equity investments occurring over the past several years, a new era of entrepreneurship–with a heightened emphasis on growth–has been ignited.

As we look forward to 2025 and beyond, our industry faces its next stage of transformation in the form of AI. Beyond revolutionizing how drugs are developed, AI will also fundamentally change how we develop and design communications and how we engage with healthcare professionals and patients alike.

During the 2020-2025 time period, accessibility and affordability gained even greater importance in the healthcare delivery equation. This has been driven by several factors, such as the rising costs of healthcare, the emergence of advanced but expensive treatments (like biologics, gene therapies, and precision medicine), and increasing pressure from both patients and policymakers. We cover this trend in greater detail in the “Emergence of Market Access” segment. [Link to video]

Given how the rise of AI will challenge traditional economic models for the delivery of our services, it follows that client procurement departments will more rigorously assess the value of our agency offerings. This will be a driving force behind even more extensive consolidations of advertising and communications services.

The rise of AI is to some degree analogous to the emergence of desktop publishing technology in the 1990s. That digital technology brought about the end of analog agency services like mechanical design and typesetting, but it unleashed entirely new forms of expertise, enabling agencie to produce more content more quickly, ultimately generating significant growth and value. 

In like manner, the rising dominance of data-driven and AI-enabled agency services will replace certain disciplines while driving the development of innovative new skill sets. At each chapter in our continuing evolution, our industry has accelerated the speed at which knowledge is reaching healthcare professionals and consumers, better empowering them to make the critical decisions that improve both health and lives.