It’s been a year.

With the pandemic forcing pharmaceutical marketers to rethink their launch and communications strategies, whilst patients and physicians spent more time online across an increasingly fragmented media landscape, and with ongoing changes to online measurement and targeting, keeping up with the everchanging pharmaceutical media landscape was a full-time job.

With Looking Backwards, Thinking Forwards, we decided to take a step back and summarise the key media trends from across 2021 that impacted healthcare advertisers. What we found has significant ramifications for how healthcare brands reach, engage and resonate with their audiences in 2022.

– After disruption to traditional healthcare practices and a growing treatment backlog, patients are becoming more engaged and willing to take greater control of their own health, altering their expectations from physicians and healthcare providers.

– We are online for longer, but the pandemic accelerated media fragmentation faster than we have seen before, scattering audience attention across multiple touchpoints throughout the day, decreasing the value of each impression made.

– Pharma marketers have had an accelerated education in media, but in their haste have fallen upon a set pattern of channels and strategies that go against the basic principles of marketing effectiveness

– As pharma has been getting to grips with online advertising, the media landscape has been shifting beneath them disrupting how they can target their audiences and measure the success of their campaigns

To finish off the report, we looked forward to what media trends we expect to see across the pharmaceutical industry in 2022 and what brands can do to get ahead of them.

To find out more download the report here.