In a bid to associate themselves with the vanguard of professional practice, marketers are ever-eager to embrace new technologies, though in highly regulated sectors, the shock of the new has a little extra resonance.
Intuitively, healthcare advertisers are among the most conservative, as the downside risk of getting marketing wrong is materially higher than for their counterparts in other verticals, such as CPG, given regulatory oversight from bodies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission, and a host of privacy regulators.
Given the risks to patient safety, subsequent litigation risk, government oversight or overall reputational risk, the risk-averse orthodoxy among marketing practitioners in the sector is well understood.
However, with the shifting sands at the Food and Drug Administration legislating how the pharmaceutical industry can market its wares, the acceleration of ad dollars from more traditional media, such as television, is only accelerating.
According to data from digital ad spending for healthcare and pharma is forecast to reach $26.2 billion, dwarfing traditional spending at $6.9 billion, with social media already surpassing linear TV for the first time in 2025, as the FDA intensifies its scrutiny on TV ads, brands are diversifying into new channels.
Sources told Digiday that as part of this trend, marketers at pharma brands are doubling down on specialized ad tech, with some insiders saying the rise of such outfits – among them DeepIntent, Patient Point and Pulsepoint – comes at the cost of legacy platforms such as demand- and sell-side platforms.
Speaking with Digiday in 2025, Mallory Wils, evp of sales at Branchlab, an ad agency focusing on the sector, pointed to a patchwork of emerging state-level regulations, requiring more adaptable and privacy-forward approaches to targeting and measurement.
In this environment, DeepIntent has emerged among this cohort after the DSP sold a majority stake in the company to Vitruvian Partners for $637 million in late 2025, with its narrative centering on the company’s ability to handle the specific complexities of healthcare marketing, where incumbents often fall short.
In the run-up to last month’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity – the advertising industry’s glamor-laden flagship event – it unfurled several updates to its ad stack, showcasing just how it’s put the private equity outfit’s investment to use.
This included the launch of “Helix AI,” described as the first agentic AI platform purpose-built for healthcare marketers. It lets users analyze patient and healthcare provider data in natural language, build audiences, and activate them via the DSP and other channels, such as social media.
Also included in the PR blitz was the unveiling of tools designed to help healthcare and pharma marketers target premium, live-streaming TV inventory – a hot-button issue of the time, given the proximity of the FIFA World Cup and NBA Finals.
Speaking at the time, DeepIntent CEO Chris Paquette said This upgraded stack is meant to support big, high‑QPS moments like live events so pharma marketing teams can buy and optimize in real time. “Our first real live event will be with the World Cup sets coming up… we have partnerships that we’ve made with the major broadcasters and platforms,” he said, adding that a slew of additional partnerships addressing other sports bodies such as MLB and NBA were in the offing.
Addressing the wider shift from linear TV to digital, Paquette further clarified his company’s bid to convince marketers that DeepIntent is a commercial intelligence and activation platform, rather than just a DSP, noting how the recent launch of Helix is totemic to this positioning.
On the question of winning business from legacy DSPs, representatives of DeepIntent were coy about naming names, albeit Paquette noted how, “we’re growing multiple times higher than what the competition is,” when probed by Digiday. “That translates to us growing, and having a disproportionate amoung ot new dollars flowing into DeepIntent.”
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