MM+M: Privacy-First Strategies in Pharma Marketing

Why These Laws Exist

The healthcare marketing industry is facing a fundamental shift. There are now 22 new state laws that seek to provide stronger protections around what's known as sensitive health data in advertising—going far beyond HIPAA's scope.

As I shared with MM+M:

"This plays into the long-standing argument that companies — certainly tech companies, but companies in general — have amassed tons of information and data on everybody over the last few decades, and there's been a lack of rules to protect or govern the use of that data. That's why they're coming up with these laws, to fill this gap."

The Patchwork Problem

Marketers are frequently coming up against a patchwork of laws that are inconsistent and constantly changing. California, Washington, Colorado, Virginia, and New York have all passed bills expanding the definition of sensitive health data beyond HIPAA. Each has different definitions for what constitutes sensitive personal information.

"The biggest challenge is that none of the state laws are black and white crystal clear."

This ambiguity opens up the opportunity for court cases and amendments to further interpret them—which makes planning a consistent nationwide strategy extremely difficult for marketers.

The Impact on Pharma Marketing

Data that potentially falls under the sensitive category is used in audience segmentation, messaging, creative development, media planning, and channel selection. As a result, many aspects of pharma marketing are weighed down by this privacy challenge.

The traditional approach—using algorithms or AI trained on healthcare data to make predictions about whether someone has a disease, then targeting them with ads—is increasingly problematic. Washington's law, for example, is clear that using any data to make a health prediction requires opt-in consent.

The Path Forward: Aggregated Data

There are three main strategies for navigating this landscape: contextual targeting, properly consented data sharing, and aggregated insights. Aggregated insights—merging information on individuals into group data—is particularly promising.

The idea is to avoid having data or making inferences about an individual's health, and instead work with information about groups of people. This allows marketers to operate in safe territory.

"You should not need to be thinking, 'Can I run in this state and not run in this state?' Working with tools that allow you to operate across the country safely without restrictions is obviously the ideal state, and aggregated data will be a part of that."

Privacy Is Not a Trade-Off

Marketers need a baseline understanding of privacy concepts—what constitutes sensitive data, and an understanding of consumer choice. While this may be a sticky area now, building privacy-safe marketing strategies will provide more accuracy and can still lead to strong brand performance.

"Anytime there's a shift or a paradigm change in an industry, it does give rise to innovation and ways to solve those challenges. It's not a trade-off."

This is exactly why we built Blueprint Audiences the way we did. We removed inferences. We removed predictions. We build audiences using group-level insights only. And because we never assign a health attribute to a person, our method works the same everywhere.