For as long as healthcare marketing has existed, marketers have operated on the assumption that protecting patient privacy and reaching patients with precision are opposing goals. That trade-off has shaped media plans, measurement frameworks and creative decisions, and it has left healthcare trailing nearly every other category in the experiences it delivers to the people who depend on it.
At Advertising Week New York, we challenged that assumption with two industry leaders. Mila Kechina leads audience analytics at Omnicom Media Health, where her team connects data with audience insight and performance marketing for healthcare brands. Elizabeth Beringer is President of Real Chemistry, which acquired her MarTech and AdTech-driven media agency. She now leads its work reaching both patients and physicians. Together they bring the analytical and the experiential view of how healthcare marketing is changing, and the full session is worth watching in its entirety.
Mila and Liz made a compelling case that the way forward depends less on knowing more about individuals and more on understanding people as whole human beings. Their argument rests on four ideas that the rest of this piece explores.
The Most Useful Signals Are Also the Least Sensitive
For most of its history, precision in healthcare marketing has depended on knowing two things at once: a person’s condition and who that person is online. Joined together, they become the most sensitive data a marketer can hold, so every step toward greater precision has also been a step closer to the privacy line.
Mila argued that clinical signals can help define a qualified audience, but they reveal very little about what someone living with a condition needs. In her example, a person managing a cardiometabolic condition is reading about nutrition, looking for ways to stay active, and trying to navigate care and insurance coverage. Those are the signals that make communication useful, and she was clear that they should shape relevance without ever being used to infer the condition behind them.
“You’ll be surprised how much affinity you can actually gain from really addressing people’s practical needs. Whether it’s navigating care or navigating access or looking for caregiver support tools, and not just from sort of talking about the condition itself.”
Mila Kechina, Head of Audience Analytics, Omnicom Media Health
Liz spoke about a time when Real Chemistry was working with a manufacturer on a hematological condition that largely affects younger men, and lifestyle data surfaced that these patients spend much of their time gaming with friends on Discord and Twitch. Rather than run a conventional pharma spot, the brand built an experience native to those platforms, complete with a character who appeared whenever the Important Safety Information ran.
“We created an entire character who actually came out any time it was time for ISI, and engagement actually spiked as the ISI was being read because it was something that was actually interesting to the patients and interesting to their caregivers.”
Elizabeth Beringer, President, Real Chemistry
The signals that make healthcare marketing precise describe how people live, what they need, and who supports them, including the caregivers and family members who rarely appear in clinical data. Those signals are also far less sensitive than a diagnosis, so precision built on them no longer pulls against privacy, and it raises a more fundamental question about whether brands need to know the individual at all.
Brands Don’t Need to Know Who the Patient Is to be Precise
Most digital marketing assumes that precision requires an individual view of every customer, built by following each person from device to device and channel to channel. In healthcare, that ambition runs straight into the privacy line, and with so much of the patient journey happening logged out across disconnected devices, it is rarely achievable anyway. Mila and Liz both argued that marketers should stop chasing it, and Mila was candid that letting go is simply part of operating in a regulated category.
“So I think we just have to accept that sometimes we are going to have blind spots, and we are not necessarily going to always see the entire individual-level journey. And that’s okay. It’s just something that we have to accept, but there are other things that we can do.”
Mila Kechina, Head of Audience Analytics, Omnicom Media Health
Rather than asking who someone is, Mila’s team asks what people are looking for and where they are already engaging with that information, whether on a health publisher, a lifestyle site, or in search. Those answers come from privacy-safe signals and context, and connecting them across the open web into a single privacy-safe and compliant view is what Taboola built Realize ID to do.
For Liz, physician marketing is B2B and can be highly specific, but patient marketing works best in broader strokes that respond to what someone has read and engaged with rather than who they are.
“I don’t want to know that it’s patient one, two, three, four, five, and creepily track them across the internet and serve them a specific ad. But technology allows us to do it in broad enough strokes where it’s still privacy safe, it’s still compliant, and we’re creating a seamless experience that’s at least reactive to what they have engaged with.”
Elizabeth Beringer, President, Real Chemistry
Liz noted that responding to what people have experienced takes a depth of content many pharmaceutical brands have not yet built, along with plans that anticipate needs across channels instead of pushing everyone down the same linear path. Done well, it also spares patients the experience everyone recognizes from retail: the ad for a pair of sunglasses that keeps following you long after you bought them.
Letting go of the individual view does raise a fair question for any executive, which is how a brand proves its marketing works if it cannot follow each patient to an outcome. Liz’s answer was that knowing what moves the needle in aggregate is all it takes, and measurement is where identity has to earn its place.
Connected Identity Turns Early Signals Into Evidence
The outcomes that matter most, such as prescription lift and audience quality, can take quarters or even years to appear in the data, which is far too long to wait before deciding where the next dollar goes. When I raised that lag on stage, we got similar answers.
Mila’s team closes that gap with early indicators that go beyond clicks. For patients, that means signals like enrollment in a support program or use of care navigation tools, and for physicians, deeper engagement with scientific information. On their own, those signals are scattered across channels and easy to misread.
Connected identity is what makes them usable, and it works without knowing who the patient is. Its job is to connect privacy-safe signals well enough to show whether exposure to media led to engagement with content and then to an action the brand cares about. The same connection reduces duplicated reach and gives a clearer view of frequency across channels.
“I think connected identity really allows us to make sense of all of these signals, make them useful. For example, giving us a view of cross-channel sequencing.”
Mila Kechina, Head of Audience Analytics, Omnicom Media Health
Mila was equally clear about the limits. Early signals have to be validated against the long-term outcomes they are meant to predict, from program enrollment to prescribing patterns and script lift, and identity alone cannot establish that one caused the other.
“I do believe that identity provides you with context and continuity, but it doesn’t really prove causation on its own.”
Mila Kechina, Head of Audience Analytics, Omnicom Media Health
That is why her team pairs connected identity with a testing framework built on a clear hypothesis, so that what looks like progress is confirmed before budgets follow it. Executives evaluating any identity solution should expect a partner to draw that distinction plainly rather than present correlation as proof.
With Realize, Healthcare Marketers No Longer Have to Choose Between Privacy and Precision
The trade-off between privacy and precision was never a law of healthcare marketing. It was the product of how the industry pursued precision, by attaching diagnoses to identifiable people and following them across the web. When brands build on what people need, understand behavior in context rather than tracking individuals, and measure in aggregate with connected identity and disciplined testing, they can reach patients more effectively and protect them at the same time.
Asked to name the word that will define healthcare in the years ahead, Mila chose human and Liz chose connected. Healthcare marketing that is both human and connected is no longer an aspiration, and the open web is where brands can put it into practice first.
Realize ID was built to make that approach practical at scale. As the identity and signal layer behind every campaign on Realize, Taboola’s performance advertising platform, it gives healthcare brands a way to act on everything this conversation described.
- Signals beyond the diagnosis. Realize ID connects context, content engagement, email, and search intent across the open web, revealing what patients, physicians, and caregivers need and where they are already looking for it.
- Reach where the journey begins. It extends beyond search and social to the logged-out open web, where people read, search, and compare long before they reach a doctor’s office.
- Privacy and compliance by design. Those signals come together in a single privacy-safe and compliant view, with support for consent, opt-out, and deletion requirements.
- Measurement tied to outcomes. By connecting exposure, engagement, and action into one journey, brands can read early indicators and tie them to the results that matter, from audience quality to prescription lift.
- No added setup. Realize ID runs automatically on every Realize campaign, so brands benefit from the first day.
For healthcare marketers, the result is the ability to reach patients, physicians, and caregivers with the relevance they expect and the privacy they deserve. Connect with the Realize team to see what that looks like for your brand.
