At A Glance
Healthcare marketing now runs across mixed-identity conditions, where authenticated data, contextual signals, and aggregated measurement all show up in the same campaign. Pharma brands need infrastructure that keeps DTC and HCP identity separate and still connects fragmented signals across activation, privacy, and measurement. Experian acts as an independent, privacy-first identity, data, and workflow layer for pharma marketers, designed specifically for this operating environment.Originally published in Digiday
Key takeaways
- Pharma campaigns now span environments with very different identity conditions, from strong addressability to contextual only signals, which makes coordination a core infrastructure challenge.
- Privacy and compliance rules require DTC (patient) and HCP (healthcare professional) data to stay in separate, non-overlapping workflows at every stage.
- Experian’s identity and workflow layer governs DTC tokenized matching and HCP deterministic National Provider Identifier (NPI) resolution as two distinct processes, never one merged identity path.
- Partner-enabled measurement connects exposure data to outcomes like script lift and qualified HCP engagement through trusted partners including IQVIA Digital, PurpleLab, and OptimizeRx.
A pharmaceutical brand launching a campaign today might rely on authenticated data in one environment, contextual signals in another, and aggregated measurement somewhere else entirely. That’s the reality of healthcare marketing right now, and most brands are still building the operational model to match it.
In a mixed-identity ecosystem, performance comes from the ability to coordinate multiple signal types across activation, privacy, and measurement workflows. Accuracy and scale depend on knowing which approach fits which environment and having the infrastructure to execute across all of them.
From onboarding to outcomes
Pharma marketing teams need identity workflows that can support accurate audience creation, governed activation, and partner-enabled measurement without combining DTC and HCP identity paths.
Download our pharma marketing playbook to help your team:
- Plan DTC and HCP identity strategies with clearer separation
- Prepare audiences for activation across approved channels and partners
- Evaluate audience quality, usable reach, and governance
Healthcare campaigns run across different signal conditions
Healthcare campaigns now run across environments with very different identity conditions, from fully addressable channels to contextual only placements. Digital advertising has long assumed that better identity leads to better targeting, frequency management, orchestration, and measurement, but healthcare has always operated with more constraints than most categories. Those constraints are becoming impossible to ignore as budgets move into connected TV (CTV), point-of-care, publisher-direct, programmatic and retail media-adjacent environments.
That shift changes the operating model. Marketers now have to manage audience strategy, supply quality and performance across channels that don’t support the same level of addressability, interoperability, or measurement visibility. In some environments, identity is strong and can support targeting and measurement. In others, identity is limited or unavailable, and marketers have to rely on contextual or aggregated signals. Managing across both environments is now a core infrastructure challenge for healthcare marketers, and it’s one that requires a deliberate strategy rather than a channel-by-channel patch.
Privacy risk is a media infrastructure issue
Privacy risk in healthcare marketing now shapes how campaigns get built and run from the ground up, extending well beyond compliance into media infrastructure itself. Tighter privacy and compliance expectations mean audience construction, exposure management, and outcomes analysis all get more complex once tracking is restricted.
Data can’t move freely across partners or workflows, and DTC and HCP data environments need to stay isolated from one another. This is especially true in pharma, where the stakes of a compliance misstep extend well beyond a campaign. This creates a more demanding operating model. Healthcare marketers have to balance identity-based and privacy-forward approaches while maintaining reach, relevance, and accountability. That balance requires governance that’s built into the infrastructure, not layered on top of it after the fact.
Experian acts as an independent, privacy-first identity, data, and workflow layer for pharma marketers, designed specifically for this operating environment:
These workflows are governed separately by design, with governed onboarding connecting fragmented DTC and HCP signals to activation-ready audiences without collapsing the two identity paths.
The mixed-identity playbook starts with matching the approach to the environment
The right mixed-identity approach depends on what each environment can support and what the campaign is needs to achieve. A pharmaceutical team may want more addressability, a publisher may only offer contextual or cohort signals, and a measurement partner may need exposure data, while platforms limit how identifiers can be shared.
Healthcare marketers need an operating model built for multiple identity conditions, with clear rules for how signals can be connected, activated, and measured without increasing privacy or compliance risk. That may include:
Experian’s infrastructure supports all three modes:
The missing layer in pharma marketing. Watch our Q&A
Supply quality is a prerequisite for measurement
Supply quality determines whether measurement in a mixed-identity environment can be trusted. When tracking and addressability vary across channels, advertisers need confidence that impressions ran in the right environments and under the right conditions before they can trust any downstream outcomes.
This is especially true in CTV and programmatic, where campaigns span fragmented supply paths, publishers, devices, and partners. Outcomes like script lift or provider engagement are only meaningful if the underlying exposure is reliable and well understood. In healthcare, this also ties directly to brand suitability and disclosure control. Curated supply, publisher-direct deals and placement-level transparency help campaigns run in appropriate environments and give measurement a more defensible foundation.
Clean rooms and tokenization support this, but their effectiveness depends on governance, interoperability, and whether insights can move cleanly across partners and workflows. Partner-enabled measurement, connecting exposure data to outcomes through trusted partners including IQVIA Digital, PurpleLab, and OptimizeRx, is structured in two steps:
- Link activation and measurement IDs without collapsing them into an open identity environment
- Produce aggregated, defensible outcomes including script lift, qualified HCP engagement, and verified delivery
Mixed-identity is the operating reality, and infrastructure is how you manage it
Mixed-identity is now the operating reality for healthcare marketing, not a temporary phase to work around. Performance depends on working across environments where identity is sometimes strong and sometimes limited by design. Healthcare marketers don’t need to pick a single identity approach and apply it everywhere. Building infrastructure that connects deterministic identity, tokenized matching, and contextual signals, keeping compliance, operational flexibility, and trust intact at every step, is what separates the brands managing this well from the ones still patching it channel by channel.
Talk to our team about your healthcare identity strategy
Whether you’re running DTC, HCP, or both, our team can help you build an infrastructure that works across identity environments. Let’s connect.
About the author
Kevin Dunn
Chief Revenue Officer, Experian
Kevin Dunn joins Experian Marketing Services with more than 20 years of leadership experience across marketing and advertising technology, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of Brands and Agencies at LiveRamp. In that role, he led growth across retail, CPG, travel, hospitality, financial services, and healthcare, overseeing new business, account expansion, and channel partnerships.
Kevin is known for building cohesive, accountable teams and leading with optimism, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose. His leadership philosophy centers on empowering people, driving positive outcomes for clients and fostering a culture where teams can grow, take smart risks, and succeed together.
FAQs
Mixed-identity means a healthcare campaign relies on more than one type of signal at once, such as authenticated data in one channel, contextual data in another, and aggregated measurement in a third. Pharma brands increasingly need infrastructure that coordinates all of these signal types together instead of treating each channel as a separate problem.
Experian keeps DTC and HCP identity in distinct, non-overlapping workflows so patient data and healthcare professional data never combine. DTC activation runs on high-fidelity tokenized matching, and HCP activation relies on deterministic National Provider Identifier (NPI) resolution using verified attributes like specialty and practice location.
Supply quality matters because outcomes like script lift or provider engagement only mean something if the underlying ad exposure is reliable. Curated supply, publisher-direct deals, and placement-level transparency give healthcare marketers a more defensible foundation before they trust any downstream measurement result.
Partner-enabled measurement connects exposure data to outcomes through trusted third parties such as IQVIA Digital, PurpleLab, and OptimizeRx, without merging activation and measurement identifiers into one open identity environment. The result is aggregated, defensible outcomes like script lift, qualified HCP engagement, and verified delivery.
Healthcare marketers don’t have to choose one approach over the other, since most campaigns already run across both conditions at the same time. Building infrastructure that connects deterministic identity, tokenized matching, and contextual signals is what allows a campaign to stay compliant while still reaching the right audience.
Latest posts
OpenAudience™ will provide marketers the ability to easily plan and buy advertising for every digitally addressable consumer across the open web LOS ANGELES, May 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — For the past decade, the most effective way to advertise in digital media has been on Facebook and Google. Marketers in the U.S. now spend two-thirds of all digital ad spend on the “walled gardens”, despite the fact that they receive less than 36 percent of total consumer time spent online. According to eMarketer, addressing this massive asymmetry in advertising – where tens of billions of dollars are over allocated to the walled gardens – is the top concern of marketers in 2019. While programmatic technology has become the primary monetization system for the open web, it has lacked the simplicity and efficacy of walled gardens. Today, OpenX is changing that paradigm by bringing true people-based marketing to the open web for the first time with the introduction of OpenAudience. OpenAudience will provide marketers and publishers with an unprecedented, unified level of knowledge about consumer audiences – through a platform built on privacy by design principles that brings the efficiency and efficacy of walled garden advertising to the open web. OpenAudience is powered by a comprehensive proprietary data asset and supplemented by integrated partnerships with recognized leaders in data and identity like LiveRamp, Tapad, a part of Experian, and more. For marketers, OpenAudience will provide the ability to plan and buy people-based marketing campaigns that combine the impact and ease of use of Facebook advertising with the scale of the open web. OpenAudience is currently in active partner testing with multiple marketers in the U.S., including Fortune 500 financial service and consumer personal care companies, along with one of America’s largest online entertainment outlets, and will be generally available to the broader market in Q3 of 2019. For publishers, OpenAudience will deliver user-based knowledge that empowers them to value and sell advertising with unparalleled precision. With the ability to automatically place consumers into high-value audience segments drawn from the more than 240M U.S. Monthly Active Users OpenX reaches across the open web, OpenAudience allows publishers to maximize revenue like never before. “OpenAudience is a natural evolution of programmatic advertising, combining the unified knowledge of people-based audiences with the transactional power of programmatic to create a planning, buying and advertising experience that is unlike anything else in the market today,” said Todd Parsons, chief product officer at OpenX. “No exchange in the market today has enabled a unified view of publisher audiences,” said Travis Clinger, vice president of strategic initiatives, LiveRamp. “Now, OpenX is democratizing identity across all publishers on the open web, helping marketers to plan and buy audiences the way they do inside walled gardens. We are thrilled to be a key component of OpenAudience.” For more information, or to request a place in the private testing phase of OpenAudience, visit: http://www.openx.com, or contact your OpenX account representative today. About OpenX Nobody understands the open web better than OpenX. As the world’s largest independent advertising exchange, OpenX makes the efficient people-based marketing buying experience of the walled gardens available to all marketers across the open web. OpenX works with more than 30,000 advertisers across every screen and device, reaching nearly one billion consumers – including a quarter billion unique consumers in the US – and processing more than one trillion transactions globally each day. To date, OpenX has helped deliver more than $3 billion in total monetization to publishers. That’s the Power of Open™. Contact us today
Tom Rolph, VP EMEA at Tapad, part of Experian, says that ad-sponsored streaming services can be successful if they can deliver a higher quality viewer experience than other streaming services. Last week, Hulu, the streaming service acquired by Fox and now owned 60 per cent by Disney, announced it will be regularising its ad loads. The streaming service will be bringing ad breaks down to 90 seconds in an effort to deliver a better viewer experience. This is a positive move from Hulu and one which other ad-supported streaming services should follow in order to be successful in a competitive market. Previously ad breaks on Hulu could vary wildly, from 180 seconds to 240 seconds, due to existing deals with its three owners: Disney, Comcast and AT&T. Over in the UK, we haven’t suffered from quite as inconsistent an approach as in the US, but there is still viewer frustration with the ad experience on ITV Hub and All4, where the problem tends to be over exposure of the same ad. Therefore, this move to standardise ad break lengths for streaming platforms is one that should be embraced on both sides of the pond. An important shift in this space will be to limit the number of ads during each show, but have better ad targeting to minimise repetitive advertising and increase the ROI of ad spend. All of which can be accomplished by investing in identity resolution products that can support CTV devices. Last year Ofcom found that in the UK subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon and NOW TV have risen above those to traditional pay TV services. With Netflix and Amazon both ad-free and NOW TV only a limited ad funded model, it’s clear that there is a growing appetite for ad-free viewing models. A fact that is only further supported when you consider the role of the BBC and BBC iPlayer. But the picture isn’t entirely negative for ad-funded models. There is demand for great content on ad-funded services in the UK, with ITV Hub boasting over 1bn requests and 540m hours of TV watched. The ITV Hub mobile app has also been downloaded on over 27m devices across the country – with over 22m people now registered to ITV Hub database, including more than half of Britain’s 16-24 year olds. However, to continue to attract and retain younger viewers, the experience will have to improve. There are several areas where ad-supported streaming providers need to improve in order to remain top players in this space: Ad experienceAs explored above, both volume and repetition of ads can be a turn off for viewers, but with Brits already spending a total of £303.16m every month on TV streaming services, according to Finder.com, there is potential for free, ad-funded models to flourish as people hit a limit on what they are willing to spend. There are already signs of improvement with the ad experience, with ITV just signing a deal with Amobee to allow for addressable ads on ITV Hub, while Sky’s AdSmart technology remains best in class and has now crossed over the pond to be used by Comcast stablemate NBC. Server reliabilityA cursory search finds little evidence of ongoing reliability problems with Netflix, but much evidence of problems with ITV Hub and All4, which are both prone to crashing. To compete with bigger players with massive server farms, server capacity needs to be tackled. This is especially true when it comes to live events, where many people will recall ITV Hub’s famous fails during the World Cup. While even some of the larger players have had similar streaming issues (for example, Amazon’s move into live sports streaming when they had to pull UK streaming of the US Open Tennis due to user complaints), viewing experience should be prioritised as the space gets increasingly competitive. Getting the content rightAmazon and Netflix have huge content budgets, but UK broadcasters remain strong in this regard, Channel 4 has enjoyed viewing figures of 7.5m for the Great British Bake Off, while ITV pulled in 13.7m for I’m A Celebrity. By building on UK-specific content that speaks to UK audiences, ad-supported streaming services can continue to pull in more viewers. Mobile accessMore and more Brits are choosing to watch TV content on their smartphone or tablet, according to UKOM-approved comScore data. In fact, 6.5m adults visited the BBC iPlayer app to watch video on either a smartphone or tablet, edging out Netflix which attracted 5.8m Getting the experience right on mobile, with the option to download content so it can be viewed in areas of low or no signal, is key.If UK ad-supported TV stations can crack these key areas for their Connected TV offering then they will be set up to succeed and offer a true home-grown alternative to the US streaming giants. Full article here. Contact us today
Tapad’s, part of Experian, SVP of Identity shows us how marketers might communicate seamlessly through emerging channels like voice, the smart home, and, yes, podcasts.In his relatively new role as senior vice president of identity at Tapad, a part of Experian, Ajit Thupil keeps a close eye on the evolution of marketing as it becomes more intent on using data and identity technology to track ROI. Here he sits with Chris Wood at Tapad’s New York offices to discuss the future of identity. (To capture the inventive atmosphere at this location, the room they chatted in was named after Leonardo da Vinci.) For Thupil, it all comes back to the customer, whether it’s a brand client or a consumer. Brands want measurability and customers demand a seamless experience across the many devices they use in a day. While consumers are understandably reticent about giving up personally identifiable information (PII), current identity solutions use anonymous data profiles to connect the dots at the individual or household level. Given the frequency that users switch devices, along with their tendency to share bigger screens like TVs, there’s no dearth of challenges for this “head of problem solving” to solve. Contact us today