By Josh Alvernia, CEO, Wrango
Lately, there’s been a growing narrative that pharma marketing has finally caught up to the rest of digital.
If that’s true, it’s worth asking a simple question: why are pharma marketers still asked to tolerate workflows, costs, and delays that no other industry would accept?
In most corners of digital advertising, marketers expect fast setup, self-service, and clear feedback loops. They iterate in days, not months, and test without committing six figures upfront. They don’t pay penalties just to use their preferred tech stack.
In pharma marketing, those expectations are still treated as unrealistic. That gap between what’s considered “modern” elsewhere and what’s considered “normal” in pharma is the real issue. Claims that the industry has already caught up simply don’t square with reality on the ground.
This is a tech problem
Importantly, pharma marketers aren’t behind because they lack sophistication. They’re behind because the tools they’ve been given do.
For years, healthcare marketing technology has been shaped by regulation, caution, and the genuinely difficult work of assembling accurate, privacy-safe data in a highly regulated environment.
Over time, the challenge of compliance and data stewardship slowed innovation at the infrastructure layer. Conservative workflows, manual processes, and tightly controlled systems helped early pharmaceutical advertisers avoid risk. Over time, that caution hardened into convention, and complexity became normalized as the cost of doing business in pharma.
That context matters, but it’s been used to justify systems that are slow, expensive, and unnecessarily complex. Pharma marketing can be compliant and privacy-safe without relying on 2015’s digital advertising tools.
The consequences of this legacy shape what pharma marketers are still asked to put up with today. This includes waiting weeks, and sometimes months, to place a pixel or enable measurement. It includes committing to large annual minimums just to access basic analytics, and paying higher feels to activate the same audience across different platforms. Pharma marketers are asked to accept black-box measurement and work around rigid, outdated workflows that discourage iteration.
No travel marketer, retail marketer, or fintech growth team would tolerate this environment, and for good reason. It’s not conducive to running performant digital campaigns. Pharma isn’t in this boat because it is different from other verticals. The root issue is that digital marketing has evolved, while healthcare marketing infrastructure largely hasn’t.
What “modern digital marketing” should look like
To understand the gap, it helps to be clear about what modern digital marketing looks like in practice.
In other industries, it means advertisers have self-serve access to effective tools, fast setup and near-real-time feedback, and the ability to iterate without artificial constraints. They have access to measurement that’s tied to business outcomes, and the freedom to work within their existing tech stacks.
This is the baseline, and pharma marketers are operating far below it.
So, when pharma marketing is described as leading the way, the question isn’t whether innovation exists — it does — but whether it’s accessible, usable, and fast enough to matter.
The real cost of pretending
When we accept the idea that pharma marketing has already caught up, we stop interrogating the friction that still defines it.
That friction has consequences for advertisers. It shows up as missed windows to influence prescribing decisions, wasted spend that doesn’t drive incremental reach, and fewer opportunities to experiment. It slows learning cycles in a market that depends on precision, and it reinforces overreliance on a single platform or vendor — not because it’s the best option, but because switching costs are too high.
At the same time, healthcare professionals don’t exist in one place. They move across search, social, programmatic, and endemic environments, just like every other audience. Reaching them effectively requires coordination across channels, and measurement that can keep pace with that movement.
Fragmentation isn’t going away. The solution lies in infrastructure that understands how healthcare marketing actually works and is built to operate across it.
Why this moment is different
We’re now operating in an outcomes-driven, AI-enabled era of advertising where speed matters as much as strategy. In this environment, speed and ease are fundamental to performance.
As for the other industries that have adapted to this reality, their marketing infrastructure is built for continuous feedback, rapid iteration, and outcomes-driven optimization. Pharma marketing, by contrast, is still being asked to operate with delayed data, rigid workflows, and artificial barriers that slow decision-making and limit experimentation.
If pharma advertisers of any size had access to top-tier advertising technology, the impact would extend far beyond operational efficiency. Media could be planned and activated around clinical events, with ads reaching healthcare professionals at moments when they’re actively treating patients with the very conditions those products address. Messaging would be timely and relevant, rather than broad or speculative. And closed-loop measurement would make it possible to understand not just who saw an ad, but whether it actually influenced prescribing behavior.
The result would be a step change for pharmaceutical advertising as a whole. Campaigns would be more precise, less wasteful, and more accountable. Smaller brands could compete on effectiveness, and marketers could finally optimize in real time.
This is what it would look like for pharma marketing to truly catch up to the rest of digital, not in theory, but in practice.
