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.
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In our Ask the Expert series, we interview leaders from our partner organizations who are helping lead their brands to new heights in AdTech. Today’s interview is with Samantha Zhang, Senior Data Scientist, and Jim Meyer, General Manager of the DASH TV Universe Study at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). DASH is an annual tracking study conducted by the ARF to define and better understand TV audience behavior and household dynamics. What does DASH measure, and how does it help the industry understand TV consumption today? By capturing hundreds of individual- and household-level data points from each respondent in a rigorous and nationally projectable sample, DASH creates a comprehensive picture of U.S. consumer TV “infrastructure” – how America watches. Core elements in DASHElements that create context in DASHTV setsLocation | brand | smartness | service modes | sources DemographicsConnected devices Game consoles |video players | streaming devicesYesterday viewing Daypart | TV/device genre | Out-of-home viewingMobile devicesOwners | sharing usersShoppingOnline and in-store | Exposure to major RMNsInternet serviceModes | ISPs | connectivity by device Streaming audio Streaming TVSVOD/AVOD tiers and sharing | FAST Email accounts and apps Live TV Modes of access | including casting from devices Social media For example, DASH gathers: Data on every TV set, including brand, room location, age, “smartness,” and connection devices and modes Household connectivity and video service data, even in homes with no TV set Internet Service Providers (ISP) and TV service usage, including Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs), virtual vMVPDs, streamers (ad-supported and premium), and Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) channels Person-level ownership and usage of video-capable mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops Measures of viewing and co-viewing across dayparts, devices, and services Additional modules covering shopping and retail media networks, streaming audio, social media, email, and apps Broad coverage and granularity make DASH a uniquely robust source of truth for practitioners across the industry, including measurement experts and ad programming strategists. DASH also reports regularly (and publicly) on key industry dynamics. DASH identified a growing segment of device-only viewers – now nearly 9 million households that watch TV, but do not own a TV set – and highlighted the implications of that trend for traditional ratings systems based only on households with TV sets. Households (HHs – million)2025 HHs (M) U.S. penetrationChange vs. 2024 (M)Total US134.8100%+2.7Connected TV (CTV)114.685%+2.1TV (Set)124.292.2%+1.1Device-only8.86.6%+1.6TV-Accessible133.198.7%+2.7 DASH called out the rise in app-based pay TV and proposed a new connection framework that better represents the modern TV world, in which linear and streaming overlap. DASH also defines the universes of households reachable with advertising. This graphic, for example, shows how all ad-supported linear and streaming properties in aggregate define the true scale of TV advertising. While 35 million households (and growing) are reachable only with streaming ads and 13 million (and falling) only with linear ads, most households are reachable with both, underscoring the importance of understanding the “overlap.” Who uses DASH data, and what decisions does it help inform? There are three primary users of DASH, each with its own use cases: Measurement providers, including Nielsen, use DASH to calibrate viewership data, turn household data into persons data (and vice versa) and estimate potential reached audiences–what the providers call media-related universe estimate (MRUEs)–for the calculation of ratings. Not surprisingly, measurement companies were the first to see the value that an independent TV universe study could provide. Media companies, including major broadcasters and streamers, use DASH to add context and color to their ad sales presentations – and to track the measurement providers, whose ratings play a major role in valuing ad inventory. AdTech companies, including Experian, use DASH to create high-value audience segments for activation. The recent accreditation of DASH by the Media Rating Council (MRC) and adoption by Nielsen as an input to its TV ratings have generated interest from a broad range of companies. We are actively pursuing new licensees and partners to make DASH more useful within, and even outside, the TV ecosystem. What does MRC accreditation signify, and why is it meaningful for DASH? MRC accreditation means DASH passed a rigorous audit conducted by Ernst & Young over many months, which validated our methodology, controls, and data quality. MRC accreditation establishes that DASH is an industry-standard dataset. While the service provider normally announces its own accreditation, the MRC took the unusual step of issuing its own release on DASH, announcing the accreditation of DASH for TV universe estimation and endorsing the study for broader, cross-media use. How does Experian use DASH data to build audiences? The segments combine specific TV usage habits and behaviors from DASH with Experian data on demographics, spending, and other contextual inputs to create a fuller view of consumer viewing behavior. They are designed to be valuable to advertisers in many categories and planning contexts – and to be customizable to fit advertisers’ media targets. The segments can be used to: Apply or suppress audiences to improve target coverage across a campaign Better align media and creative Reach elusive but high-value viewers, such as Ad Avoiders Drive valuable consumer behavior Achieve specific advertising objectives What are some practical use cases for DASH-based audiences? Here are some practical use cases for four different kinds of DASH segments in five different advertiser categories. Travel Co-WatchersA couples-only resort uses TV Co-Watching Households without Children to strengthen target reach and ad memory recallA big theme park destination uses TV Co-Watching Households with Children to reach families in moments of togetherness Home Entertainment TV Owners and Brand LoyalistsA premium TV manufacturer uses the overlap of Multi Brand TV Owners and Single Brand TV Loyalist Households to market its newest TV model to its most loyal consumers. Fast Food Screen Size ViewersA fast food chain with a high-impact new brand campaign uses Large Screen TV Viewers to better align the media and creativeThat same fast food chain uses Small-Screen TV Viewers to drive store traffic by increasing exposure of its retail campaign among on-the-go viewers Financial Services Cord Cutters A personal cost management app and a cash-back credit card target Streaming-First Cord Cutter Households to reach young, tech-savvy, cost-conscious consumers Thanks for the interview. Where can readers learn more about DASH? We started work on DASH seven years ago, and it’s been fun to watch it “grow up.” Our partnership with Experian is a big step toward putting DASH to work for advertisers and agencies. To learn more, visit our site at https://theARF.org/DASH or contact us at DASH@theARF.org. Contact us About our experts Samantha Zhang, Senior Data Scientist at ARF Samantha Zhang is a Senior Data Scientist at the Advertising Research Foundation working on the DASH TV Universe Study, with additional research spanning areas including attention measurement, digital privacy, and artificial intelligence. Jim Meyer, General Manager, DASH, at ARF Jim Meyer is general manager and co-founder of the ARF DASH TV Universe Study and managing partner of Golden Square, LLC, which advises media and research technology companies on growth strategy and development. Latest posts
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