March 16, 2026
Pharma marketing has a data advantage, which is exactly why our Chief Data and Performance Officer has spent his career in the field. In this 3-part series, John Bracey uncovers the five underlying principles that guide his work with clients, helping them achieve better outcomes.
John Bracey | Chief Performance & Data Officer
If you told a data scientist in retail or finance that they could have access to a dataset that was perfectly attributable, competitively informative, and tied directly to human outcomes, they’d ask where to sign up. That’s the secret of pharmaceutical marketing.
Those of us in this industry don't have to settle for proxies or “maybe.” We get to build on a foundation of rich, deterministic truth with healthcare claims, prescribing behavior, and longitudinal treatment journeys.
That reality is one of the core reasons I continue to work in this space. When used responsibly and intelligently, these data assets unlock a level of precision, accountability, and learning velocity that most marketers never experience.
But all the perfect, abundant data in the world means nothing if we don’t use it to empower consumers to make better decisions about their health, wellness, and happiness.
The approach that I’ve used repeatedly is grounded in activating paid, owned, and earned strategies across five core principles.
These principles move pharma marketing from campaign execution to outcome systems. This post will outline the first two principles, and there will be two additional blog posts with the remaining three.
The most dangerous assumption we can make in pharmaceutical marketing is believing the first media plan is correct. It rarely is.
Our real objective at this stage is to deploy the most revenue-accretive plan possible–the one that will drive the most top-line growth–given the data available today, while intentionally building the measurement and learning infrastructure required to improve it tomorrow.
The approach adapts to data maturity.
In every case, the strategy is designed to evolve. The goal is not perfection at launch. The goal is learning faster than the market and compounding that learning into better outcomes over time.
One of the most common misconceptions in direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical marketing is treating audience strategy as a point solution–seeing the identification of customers as a one-time tactical fix instead of an ongoing integrated process.
Let’s look at defining a target as “patients diagnosed with a condition who have failed first- and second-line therapies.”
I’ve reviewed that strategy many times, and I’ve seen it underperform just as often. The definition isn’t wrong. The problem with that example is the definition is assumed rather than tested.
Building an effective audience strategy requires structured experimentation across two dimensions. Even with deterministic data, interpretation still requires experimentation.
Brands should test audience definitions at varying levels of clinical specificity, such as:
This vertical experimentation framework allows teams to understand where scale, efficiency, and conversion actually occur instead of defaulting to the most restrictive definition.
Brands must also test across audience vendors. No single partner is best in every scenario, and each brings different data sources, methodologies, and inherent biases.
A strong audience portfolio prioritizes:
Audience strategy in pharma should never be treated as a fixed definition. It should be treated as a testable system. The winning audience is not the one that sounds most clinically precise. It is the one proven, through structured experimentation, to deliver the best balance of scale, efficiency, and incremental impact.
Pharmaceutical marketing does not lack data, and it rarely even lacks strategy. What is often missing is a system designed to learn.
Organizations that treat their first media plan as a starting point rather than a conclusion gain a structural advantage. Each test compounds insight, and each iteration improves precision. Over time, outcomes improve because the system continuously gets smarter.
In the next post, I’ll explore how measuring the right outcomes and coordinating healthcare provider and consumer strategies turn that learning into sustained performance.
If these ideas resonate and you’d like to explore how MERGE approaches outcome-driven pharma marketing, let’s connect!
