Pharma is after eyeballs. Not just literally for donation, of course, but as more and more options are out there catching attention—traditional media, digital, apps, smart speakers, podcasts, etc.—it’s proving more important than ever to target the right eyeballs with the right messaging at the right time. That’s where the shift to programmatic advertising comes in.
Healthcare advertising technology company DeepIntent has brought on Amit Chaturvedi for the inaugural role of chief operating officer. His job is to scale the company as pharma brands continue to embrace programmatic formats away from the more traditional linear TV. Last year alone, CTV platform spend increased 25-fold.
DeepIntent increased its own growth, going from double-digit employees to triple in just a few years; Chaturvedi’s goals as COO include keeping this massive expansion going without diluting the offerings to clients. He breaks it down in three points.
“I think sustaining this sort of aggressive growth while we're still delivering on client promises is probably No. 1. Second is this legacy of innovation: As the foundation is getting stronger, how do we not slow down the pace of innovation for our clients? So as you get bigger, the choices become harder—how we deploy capital?
"That decision becomes a little more difficult. And then I think third, probably the most important, a couple years ago, the company had 60-70 employees, there's now close to 300 employees. So how do you harness the superpower of each of the team members that have been added? We've got team members and on multiple continents and various time zones. So if we were all the Avengers, how do we make sure that we know the superpower of each of the Avengers?”
Chaturvedi’s background in operating experience in advertising technology startups and global media companies spans 20 years. His last role was as executive vice president of revenue operations and product at WarnerMedia, heading the linear and digital revenue operations functions. While he’s always been on the tech side, about 10 years ago he worked at QualityHealth (acquired by Sharecare), and today he sees the changes that time has brought to the pharma industry’s understanding of the digital side.
“When I look at the caliber of the folks that are clients and partners, the general sort of knowledge about pharma specifically, let alone digital and programmatic, it’s dramatically higher, than I remember 10-15 years ago,” he said.
“We’d walk into client meetings, and that was a very successful company. but there were often instances where clients felt like we were speaking in a totally different language, like we didn't even know how to communicate, and now most of us are speaking versions of the same dialect.”