• by Wayne Friedman , August 26, 2020

As the pharmaceutical and health-care business focuses heavily on national TV spending and looks to adapt to a changing market, specialized health-care demand-side platform (DSP) DeepIntent has started a programmatic connected TV marketplace.

Chris Paquette, founder and chief executive officer of DeepIntent, notes that 50% of pharmaceutical media spend already goes to TV. According to industry estimates, this totals $4 billion to $4.5 billion per year. Now with the rapid growth of CTV, Paquette says marketers need to make adjustments.

All this comes with heightened interest in health-care issues in the wake of COVID-19, where CTV has seen soaring usage.

"The new normal for pharmaceutical companies is that they want more flexibility in their budgets," he says. "The days of committing so much of their budgets up front are [changing]."

Given the uncertainty of this year's national TV upfront market, as well as a longer trend to shift media quickly, he says the timing is ideal to start up a pharma-specific TV marketplace.

What makes DeepIntent different from other broad-based DSPs is data that comes from reaching 1.6 million health care providers as well as data, in a "HIPAA-compliant way," from 300 million patients.

Starting a CTV marketplace for marketers as part of DeepIntent is important because of the DSP's key data partnerships -- especially when it comes to privacy-compliant safety issues.

DeepIntent, which launched in 2016, has what Paquette calls "patient modeled audiences" where it can extract demographic attributes for specific medical conditions. The DSP also integrates with pharmaceutical marketers' CRM systems for real-time feedback.

DeepIntent's CTV Marketplace can access premium publishers such as NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, A&E Networks and Discovery through partnerships with supply-side platforms such as Xandr, SpotX, and Magnite (formerly Rubicon Project/Telaria).

Current pharma clients include AstraZeneca, Bayer, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline, among others.

With regard to mounting CTV fraud issues, DeepIntent has security partner deals that will start up with Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify in the fourth quarter of this year.

Paquette says: “Our whole idea with this announcement there is a consistency in the buying experience for the pharma marketer -- whether they are buying digital, connected TV or advanced [advertising] to the TV.... the same measurability, same addressability, as you would in buying any other digital channel.”