GoodRx’s unleashing of a lasso-wielding cowgirl wrangled up more readers than any other Pharma &
Health Insider of 2025. The campaign’s theme of taming the Wild West of drug prices was “a good metaphor for the way people feel about the challenges of getting prescriptions at an
affordable price and without a great waste of time,” Ryan Sullivan, the prescription drug discounter’s CMO, told us.
Telehealth firm Noom had its own idea of how to lower drug
prices: the U.S. should establish a “High-Priced Drug List” for brands from overseas, allowing Noom and others to sell cheaper compounded versions of drugs that make the list. On our own
list, a column centered around Noom’s ad campaign selling its proposal
came in fourth on the 2025 top 10 list.
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Noom is big on GLP-1s, as is FuturHealth, whose top execs – in our no. 2 story of the year --talked to us about positive data from their telehealth platform
that combines the weight-loss drugs with customized meal plans. “Our goal is to be a program, not just a prescription,” said John Levan, chief product officer.
In addition to Noom
and FuturHealth, a third telehealth company also made the top 10.
In our no. 8 story, “Midi Health Takes on Meta Over Rejected Women's Sexual Health Ads,” CMO
Emily Jordan told us that “our ads were getting denied. And we were talking about medical care. We were talking about vaginal atrophy, vaginal dryness, low libido that are all associated
with hormonal decline. So we knew we had to act.” Midi’s owned-media ads in response called out Meta’s censorship while promoting Midi’s services.
In another
aggressive campaign, the Canadian province of British Columbia swooped into the nearby states of Washington, Oregon and California with marketing designed to recruit dissatisfied doctors and nurses to
come north. “Uncertainty is high in the U.S., upsetting many people, especially healthcare professionals,” Matt Bielby, creative director and partner of creative agency Here Be Monsters,
said in the year’s no. 9 story.
Eli Lilly, meanwhile, was also
recruiting -- and on a much larger scale -- with its “Seeking” image campaign, chief corporate brand officer Lina Polimeni told us in our no. 5 story, What was “the biggest recruitment ad a pharma company has
ever put out” also functioned as a statement of Lilly’s purpose: “When we say that we put health above all, it’s not just something we say, but something we do every
day.”
Up at no. 3, one another pharma company joined Lilly on the most-read list: Novartis, in a column about how the firm was moving into sports sponsorships, including a PlayersTV series titled “Health is
Wealth.”
Stories about plastic surgery (no.6), sleep health (#7) and blood tests (#10) complete the Pharma & Health Insider top 10.
Plastic surgery comes under the RealSelf platform, which decided to give itself a facelift. The reason: aesthetics customers are getting younger. “We’re seeing consumers as young as
high school students talking about wanting baby botox, a lip filler, or liquid injectable nose jobs -- things that feel a little less permanent but still help them get closer to self-actualization,
“CEO Minou Clark told us.
Our sleep health story, which ran a year ago next week, focused on innovations launching at CES and, separately, from Somnee, which was developing a headband
that “not only tracks how well you’re sleeping but actually fixes your sleep,” said CEO Tim Rosa.
On the blood test front, we spoke with founder Eric Olson about how his firm
BetterWay was able to come up with the fingertip blood testing holy grail that Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes failed at so miserably. “We followed a completely different playbook” than
Theranos, he said.