Pharmaceutical marketing is no longer the starting point of the patient journey. Amanda DeVito, Chief Marketing Officer at Butler/Till, says patients now arrive at their first HCP appointment influenced by search, social platforms, peer communities, and AI-generated health information long before a pharmaceutical brand enters the conversation. In many cases, the conversation and the patient’s perceptions are already shaped before pharma shows up at all.
In the interview, DeVito argues that too many brands still behave as though they control the message, mistaking compliance for strategy and caution for connection. The marketers breaking through today are not resisting regulation. They are finding smarter, more creative ways to work within it to deliver genuinely useful information when patients need it most. That shift requires brands to move beyond awareness and toward utility. As DeVito puts it, “Visibility is a media buy. Usefulness is strategic.”
The discussion also explores how AI is reshaping healthcare marketing and patient discovery. DeVito says Butler/Till believes AI will fundamentally change how patients discover, evaluate, and trust health information long before they encounter a brand campaign. While AI can accelerate the spread of misinformation, it also creates an opportunity for healthcare brands to deliver more accurate, personalized, and timely information at scale. The brands that succeed, she argues, will be the ones that earn trust before they try to capture attention. Ultimately, DeVito says breakthrough healthcare brands are defined by courage: a willingness to say something true, center the patient experience, and focus on outcomes that drive meaningful behavior change.
The editorial staff had no role in this post's creation.