29 June 2026
The End of the Wait
For most of its history, the defining feature of healthcare marketing was not creativity or science. It was waiting. A campaign launched, then weeks or months passed before anyone could say whether it worked. A question for the analytics team became a ticket in a queue. An insight that might have reshaped a strategy often arrived a quarter too late to use. The work was rigorous. It also moved at the speed of its slowest handoff.
That pattern is breaking, and a partnership between Havas Media Network North America and DeepIntent is a clear example of why. The agency and the healthcare data platform are attacking the constraint that has held the category back for decades: the time it takes to move from question to answer, and from brand to patient. The old feedback loop, says Chris Paquette, founder and CEO of DeepIntent, could “take literally half a year at best”: run a campaign, wait, pull a csv, analyze it, then start again. AI now compresses interpretation, analysis, and execution into the same day. Greg James, CEO of Havas Media Network North America, puts the pace in blunter terms. “A year in AI terms is a million years in so many ways,” he says, and in a field this slow to move, a million years is roughly what it takes to feel different.
Worldwide spending on generative AI is on track to reach roughly $644B in 2025, up more than 75% in a year[1], and early adopters report cost savings above 15% and productivity gains above 22%, according to Gartner[2]. For an industry where three in four American adults manage at least one chronic condition[3], and where timing along the patient journey can shape outcomes, speed is not a convenience. It is part of the result.
Democratizing the data, not just the dashboards
Speed alone does not explain the change. What makes it durable is who now holds the data. Paquette points to Helix AI, the platform DeepIntent built and is now scaling with Havas, which puts 240 million de-identified patient lives within reach of a strategist who does not write code. Finding health deserts, mapping diagnoses against underserved geographies, reading the competitive and formulary picture: work that once required a specialist and a long wait becomes a conversation. “We’re democratizing access to this data,” he says, “almost decentralizing that area of expertise into the hands of the marketer.”
James describes the same shift as a shared direction of travel. “We’re sort of on a journey of democratization together,”he notes, moving from access to care toward access to the data behind it. Healthcare has long been one of the most siloed data environments in marketing, and the value of the partnership is not the model itself but the way it dissolves the barriers between fragmented sources. Broad AI adoption has not automatically produced results. Tools are everywhere; the advantage goes to teams that rewire the workflow, not the ones that bolt a model onto the old process.
Speed buys creativity, and room for compliance
The point of saving time is what teams do with it. “The job kind of gets more about the innovation and the creativity,”James says, describing junior staff who once spent four weeks rebuilding a plan and now spend an hour on several versions. Paquette sees the next frontier in the creative itself: not a dozen variations of an asset but thousands, each tested in real time. In a category where every claim faces review, that abundance is also a compliance strategy. More approved variations mean more responsiveness without more risk, and a better chance that patients see themselves represented in the work.
The same logic is reshaping how brands reach those patients, because the spend follows the audience and the audience has moved. Healthcare and pharma digital ad spending reached roughly $24.8B in 2025, up more than 13% in a year, while social overtook linear television as a primary channel for the first time, according to eMarketer[4]. Linear’s share is projected to fall to about 12% of the mix by 2027.[5]
Live attention, finally measurable
Live sports is the exception to that decline, and it is where the partnership sees its next opening. “Live sports command a big audience. They have immersive experiences. So pharma brands want to participate,” says Holly Dunn, Managing Partner and Head of Investment and Activation at Havas Media Network North America. The obstacle was structural. Pharma’s reliance on 60 and 90 second spots, set against the premium of live programming, made the buy hard to justify, with little targeting and less proof.
What changes the math is making that premium inventory both addressable and accountable. DeepIntent’s algorithms target the right patient audiences inside live-sports environments, pace and optimize delivery in flight, and tie it to outcomes. Healthcare advertisers, says Lisa Kopp Johnson, Chief Revenue Officer at DeepIntent, care about “script and reaching the right patient audiences,” not vanity metrics. Because measurement is built into the platform, the model optimizes toward “script lift, reaching patients” rather than “viewability or clicks,” so a brand can enter premium live programming with the same closed-loop return it expects from any other channel.
Havas supplies the other half: a data foundation that is always on, and the investment and activation muscle to move quickly. “A strong agency partnership, like we have with DeepIntent, really allows us to be flexible, to act on those opportunistic moments,” Dunn says. The team does not rebuild the plumbing each time; the foundation is already built and in place.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup turns the theory into a live test. Hosted across the United States, it pairs the mass scale of the world’s biggest sport with delivery down to regional and local markets. The opening U.S. match drew nearly 25 million viewers,[6] and Fox expects roughly 150 million across the tournament, with 76% of American soccer fans in the millennial and Gen Z cohorts every health brand wants to reach.[7]National reach and addressable, measurable audiences now sit inside the same buy, the combination that used to be out of reach.
The same goal at both ends
Underneath the tools, the purpose is simple. “The most important job of the marketer is to help get more drugs to market faster” and more efficiently, Paquette argues, especially as therapies grow more personalized and patient populations grow smaller. The precision oncology market alone eclipsed $130B in 2025 and is growing close to 10% a year,[8] which means more treatments aimed at fewer, more specific people. Havas and DeepIntent have set out to lower the cost and friction of connecting each treatment to the patient who needs it.
Whether the lever is a shared AI platform that hands rich data to a non-technical strategist, or a World Cup broadcast that finally pays back a pharma media plan, the direction is the same: less waiting, more access, for the marketer and the patient alike. The waiting room, in every sense, is emptying out.
To learn more about how Havas Media Network and DeepIntent are delivering results-driven campaigns that drive better patient outcomes, connect with Amanda Dyke, Managing Partner of Marketing & Communications, North America, [email protected]
[1] Gartner, “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide GenAI Spending to Reach $644 Billion in 2025,” March 31, 2025 (figure is total worldwide GenAI spend; roughly 80% is hardware). https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-03-31-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-genai-spending-to-reach-644-billion-in-2025
[2] Gartner, “Gartner Predicts 30% of Generative AI Projects Will Be Abandoned After Proof of Concept by End of 2025,” July 29, 2024 (survey averages: 15.8% revenue increase, 15.2% cost savings, 22.6% productivity improvement). https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-07-29-gartner-predicts-30-percent-of-generative-ai-projects-will-be-abandoned-after-proof-of-concept-by-end-of-2025
[3] IMARC Group, “US Healthcare Advertising Market” (three in four U.S. adults manage at least one chronic condition; per CDC). https://www.imarcgroup.com/us-healthcare-advertising-market
[4] eMarketer, “US Healthcare and Pharma Ad Spending 2025” (digital ad spend $24.8B, up more than 13% YoY; first year social outpaces linear TV): https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-healthcare-pharma-ad-spending-2025. Figures detailed in Fierce Pharma, quoting eMarketer: https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/2026-forecast-pharma-ad-dollars-will-continue-shifting-away-traditional-tv
[5] eMarketer’s Beth Snyder Bulik, quoted in Fierce Pharma, “2026 Forecast: Pharma Ad Dollars Keep Moving Away From Linear TV,” December 2025 (linear TV’s share falling from more than 30% in 2021 to 12% in 2027, as digital reaches 82%). https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/2026-forecast-pharma-ad-dollars-will-continue-shifting-away-traditional-tv
[6] SportsPro, “2026 FIFA World Cup opener delivers US ratings record,” June 2026 (U.S. opener drew nearly 25M viewers). https://www.sportspro.com/news/broadcast-ott/fifa-world-cup-2026-fox-telemondo-us-ratings-viewership-advertising-june-2026/
[7] Nielsen, “Engaging U.S. Soccer Fans Ahead of FIFA World Cup 2026” (76% of U.S. soccer fans are millennials or Gen Z). https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2025/world-cup-2026/
[8] Towards Healthcare, “Precision Oncology Market” ($132.87B in 2025, 9.9% CAGR): https://www.towardshealthcare.com/insights/precision-oncology-market. Corroborating: Grand View Research, “Precision Oncology Market Report” ($132.87B in 2025): https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/precision-oncology-market-report