AI Skepticism to Adoption in the Pharma Marketing Industry

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Angela Tenuta, President, Full Service Agencies, at EVERSANA INTOUCH, explores the findings of their study What Matters Most: The Trends That Will Shape Pharma Marketing In 2025. Tenuta emphasizes the importance of embracing AI as an innovation and highlights specific examples of how AI is being used to improve efficiency and effectiveness in marketing campaigns. The discussion also discusses the ethical considerations associated with AI, particularly regarding patient privacy and data security. The conversation also touches on the growing importance of direct-to-patient (DTP) models and the challenges and opportunities associated with globalization in healthcare, emphasizing the need for cultural sensitivity and adaptability in global marketing campaigns to effectively reach diverse audiences.

The study mentions skepticism surrounding the practicality of AI in pharma marketing. Can you elaborate on specific examples of how AI is proving its value in that space?

Short answer is AI is going to make a ton of impact everywhere. It's increasingly woven into every aspect of everyday life, from education all the way through to note taking for Christmas list, and into how we do our work across every industry. So that is happening the time for skepticism has to end.

That doesn't mean we're whole hog going to throw everything into it, but it certainly means that it's an innovation that we're going to have to absorb and push forward, much like we had with the internet or with mobile phones. This is just another one that we're going to make an aspect of our life. I say a lot that for agencies, AI, is really existential. We have to be testing these things. We have to be doing our own R&D. We have to be figuring out every little tool and piece that can accelerate the work or make it more targeted or more relevant. Our clients are a little less adopting of it. They're relying upon us to bring the tested, tried, safe pieces forward to them, and that's a wonderful place to be, I think right now, absolutely, the hype is, is the hype is out there, but also the results are starting to get out there.

So just in terms of what we've done at EVERSANA INTOUCH, we're big adopters of Adobe Firefly, for example. So, our whole creative team, all of the images that we're starting to source that aren't huge, conceptual images, are AI generated to start, and that's already been an amazing savings. You can understand there were whole departments of rights management teams and hours and hours spent on Getty, trying to search things. And now we can be creators that, in itself, is awesome. We're using a lot of Adobe products, so we also use Figma and a whole bunch of different kind of connectors that take digital assets down into modules and bring them through the process a lot faster. So that's been huge. We're using AI and copy in closed box, copilot type settings, where we can start from core claims and bring it forth into more conversational tones for different adaptations. So, you can kind of pre-code a lot of that now. So that's really speeding up our work and allowing our copywriters to do more. And they love it, because it's not so much the grunt work and the busy work, it's really being able to apply their time to more strategic endeavors.

Our Founder and Chief Innovation Officer coined a phrase ‘pharmatizing AI’. So outside of those kind of day to day in the work things, we're also making our own batches of tools that change, that change how we function, and maybe the clients will be adopt adopting as well. Some of them are, and that's things like med reg accelerators or putting tools on medical websites that can quickly now do use machine learning to get to co pay totals and even sometimes make a doctor's appointment like there's a lot of really exciting applications that were not available to us that are starting to be available to now. So yes, hesitancy is reasonable, skepticism is reasonable, but I think we have all got to embrace this moment in every way we can.