Healthcare advertising has always been more difficult than advertising in other industries. The medical field has layers of regulations to help prevent targeting and following specific users with advertising.

Laws like HIPPA prevent the use of any first-party data in targeting users. Alongside this, you have the absolute need to make certain that your ads are serving on 100% brand-safe sites. This has left most advertisers who handle healthcare clients to devise creative tactics to help find the right users.

Advertisers have moved towards using a mix of tactics to help capture the audience they are seeking. Some advertisers will use a mix of endemic sites in addition to their non-endemic mix to help ensure that they are reaching the best possible users within their specific needs. These endemic sites help to ensure that your ads are serving on a relevant site with qualified and engaged users who are interested in the topic matter that your brand addresses.

Also helpful is the use of contextual targeting to try to capture the right audience as a surrogate for not having large amounts of data on the audience you are targeting. The reason is that with data being so restricted on patients and their healthcare privacy, we try to come as close to where they will be looking for information regarding their health issues. However, there is the use of audience data from companies such as Crossix that are able to provide in-depth audiences, based on their network of healthcare analytics. You can layer their audience data on top of any of the behavioral or demographic data you are currently using to come as close as possible to finding your audience. You also have the merging of IMS Health and Quintiles. They have combined to provide a comprehensive reporting and optimization tool for healthcare advertisers. The IMS AdIQ tool helps to bring in healthcare provider data to match anonymous users to the media exposure to show actual patient-level data conversion tracking. What that means is that you will be able to show ROI on your healthcare advertising tactics. With all of these options coming into play for healthcare advertising, it is important to note that some platforms have not fully adopted the use of the data segments to be loaded and have ads served against in their platforms. This is because they still consider these data segments to be the grey area within healthcare advertising.

The scope of healthcare marketing is ever changing. We have two industries that are in a constant state of flux and advancement. With that comes the ever-increasing need for the healthcare industry to ensure that patient data maintains its privacy, while the advertising industry is simultaneously creating ways to improve marketing to meet the needs of the healthcare consumers. As advertisers we need to be sure that we are creative, intelligent and nimble with our healthcare marketing efforts.