Pharma marketers weigh economy and chance of TV ad ban during upfronts season

“Pharma is the port in the storm. When other categories might be pulling back, it’s not unusual to see pharma stay flat to up, in terms of overall investment,” Publicis Health Media CEO Andrea Palmer told Digiday.

While brands in the sector aren’t subject to the tides of consumer sentiment like automotive or CPG advertisers, they’re not ignoring current affairs. “We’d be foolish to think it wouldn’t be on their minds,” said Toby Katcher, svp video investment, CMI Media Group.

According to Jason Gloye, NA lead and global chief client officer at VML Health, pharma marketers are also likely to drag out media negotiations beyond the traditional end of upfronts season on July 4th.

“There’s a lot of hesitation and caution in general, both politically and economically,” he said.

Kennedy’s threat

In any case, pharma marketers may face their own specific challenge in the months to come. Kennedy has repeatedly suggested that the Trump Administration could lay down a TV ad ban and while it’s unlikely to come to pass, stranger policy ideas than this have been advanced by the current U.S. government (see: Greenland, the Panama Canal, tariffs levied on uninhabited islands).

When it comes to their media spend, it appears most pharma brands are taking their cues from the same playbook deployed around the TikTok ban: don’t panic, and keep business going as usual right up until the moment it’s taken away from you.

That’s because for those considering the path forward, there are almost as many unknowns associated with the policy as there are complaints. We don’t know, for example, how much of the pharmaceutical industry would be affected, nor which products would be prevented from being shown in commercial breaks.

It’s also unclear what Kennedy and the administration consider “television” — one of the few plots of common ground it shares with the ad industry. Would a ban only extend to linear broadcast TV and cable, or would it include FAST channels or ad-supported streaming? What about YouTube?

Even if the policy gets left on the administration’s “to-do” list, its threat represents another plate for pharma marketers to spin alongside increasingly strict healthcare privacy laws at the state level. Branchlab evp of sales Mallory Wils pointed to stricter legislation in New York and Washington as “setting the tone for stricter privacy standards across the board.”

“Marketers are now navigating a patchwork of emerging state-level regulations, requiring more adaptable and privacy-forward approaches to targeting and measurement,” Wils added.

In response, Palmer said clients were looking for additional flexibility from publishers, in the form of opt-out clauses or cancellation levers in contracts. Though already a “category reality” for the sector’s approach to upfronts season (a drug’s regulatory process delaying ad campaigns is a familiar scenario) there’s even more reason to make the ask this year, Palmer said.

She added: “No one has a crystal ball – there’s economic uncertainty and administrative uncertainty and all of those things are outside of the control of anyone, but it’s important to conceptually future proof the business.”

Beyond television

Until recently, pharmaceutical advertisers were TV stalwarts. Prescription drug brands collectively accounted for 13%, some $2.18 billion, of all linear U.S TV ad spend in 2025, according to iSpot. 

The sector has typically taken a conservative stance on emerging channels. Healthcare and pharmaceutical advertisers spent more media dollars (27.8% of the sector’s $30 billion 2024 total ad spend) on TV, radio, out-of-home and print than any other client category.

And as consumer brands moved spend out of linear, the advertisers remaining have been able to take advantage of more favorable pricing.

That status quo won’t be in place for much longer. Like consumer brands, some pharma clients are hoping to spread their media investments across a broader swathe of digital channels, following the path beaten by consumer brand marketers.

Increasingly, they’re spending on CTV, paid social and creator marketing. Overall category spend increased 5% between 2023 and 2024, and according to eMarketer, the majority of that increase came from investment on digital channels. U.S. pharma digital ad spending is expected to rise to $20.19 billion this year, up from $14.95 billion in 2022.

“We’ve seen in our agency a pretty substantial growth in digital video,” said Debbie Makrakis, vp of video investment at CMI; she didn’t provide an exact breakdown. 

“They’re understanding that you can be more niche in your targeting than linear TV. It’s not just age and demo anymore. We can use first-party targeting lists. We can use health diagnoses and disease states that we can target against,” she said.

“Unless it’s a mass vaccine or Advil or heartburn medication, it’s really wasteful to just go linear,” noted VML Health’s Gloye.

And when they are buying big-ticket TV, they’re increasingly targeting live sports programming in their investment – particularly NFL coverage – which offers advertisers of all stripes one of the last sure bets for mass reach.

“Pharma has not traditionally been a big player in [the] NFL. They’re becoming that now,” said a head of investment for a holding company who exchanged anonymity for candor.

“Pharma has really shifted from thinking about TV only, to multi-screen,” added Branchlab’s Wils.

Michael Bürgi contributed to this report.