How AI is Shaking Up Pharma Marketing

Pharmaceutical Executive: How is artificial intelligence shaking up the pharma marketing space?
Ted Sweetser: The first top level one that everyone is paying attention to right now (because it’s the most visually engaging) is the ability of art related large-language models to create new forms of content. We saw everyone get excited when OpenAI released an update that allowed users to create Studio Ghibli inspired art, which turned into a meme.

More broadly, people are saying that if they can increase the amount of content that they can generate exponentially by using AI that’s been trained on licensed data sets that are permitted for those uses, there’s a whole world of new, specific messaging to create. That feeds into the personalization, which is a huge part of omnichannel branding, messaging, and building a relationship directly between brands and consumers.

While that’s very exciting in the space generally, pharma is beholden to a higher standard. We’re all familiar with the MLR process of legal review to make sure that everything works. We were at this year’s MM&M Transform conference hearing from a number of creatives about the number of possibilities raised from this space.

A consistent theme was that people can create as much new content as they want, but it still needs to go through thorough vetting to ensure that nothing is being misrepresented about the impact of the drug and that it meets with FDA standards. While it is very exciting, it’s something that’s still further down the line, although it is a factor that agencies are going to be thinking about when it comes to the way that they approach creative.