Moving Forward

The point of advertising is to get a human response. If you’ve watched Mad Men, you’ve seen how inspired advertisers think. Advertising is fundamentally a creative process, but somewhere along the way we’ve tipped the scales away from creativity in favor of overly quantified metrics. Business may ultimately come down to numbers, but we need to assess how far we may have gone in the wrong direction and whether it’s actually slowing us down. Risk aversion to keep small NBRx gains is common, and it’s also killing exceptional, fully compliant work before it even has a chance to break through the noise. Our best thinkers and our audiences deserve better.

Regardless of whether you’re targeting HCPs or patients, they are human. It’s no secret that even they are paying premiums on top of their basic digital subscriptions just to avoid advertising. Blocking ads has become an industry itself; that’s how much they don’t want to see our strategic, very expensive messaging. Now with AI assistance in the development of creative concepts and media plans, and in bringing data together for ROI attribution, we’re actively working against ourselves by inching closer to positioning pharma ads like “spray and pray” clickbait. Cheapening advertising cheapens the impact, and cheapened impact makes potentially life saving messages meaningless.

People want authenticity and agency as individuals, and the old ways aren’t capturing attention like they used to. We shouldn’t look at AI as just a way to accelerate advertising operations, but as an opportunity to reinstall creative and strategic vision into what we do. This is the perfect time for advertising roles to evolve from task-based work to judgement-based work. Opening roles for the right perspectives will help move the industry forward by making space for rethinking a budget for branded banners to give the people what they want instead: a real connection.

Written by Dr. Nadia Khatri, unassisted by generative AI
Published September 9, 2026