Q&A with DeepIntent: The Evolving Role of CTV in Healthcare Advertising

As healthcare marketers continue to lean into CTV, expectations around precision, privacy, and performance are rising. We spoke with Nicole Alfonso, VP of Media Partnerships at DeepIntent, about how CTV is evolving, and what it takes to drive meaningful outcomes in a regulated category.

CTV adoption is accelerating across the healthcare and pharma sectors. What major shifts are you seeing in how these marketers approach video investment today?

The biggest shift is that healthcare marketers are approaching CTV with a performance mindset. Reach still matters, but pharma brands increasingly want addressable reach that can be justified, optimized in-flight, and learned from. It’s about transparency, brand-safe environments, and defensibility, because healthcare marketing is one of the most scrutinized categories in advertising. That’s why CTV continues to accelerate: it scales precision and accountability in a way linear TV can’t match.

Healthcare brands often require highly precise and privacy-safe audience strategies. How is DeepIntent enabling more compliant, data-driven targeting within CTV environments?

Healthcare has always required precision, but today that precision has to be delivered with stronger privacy guardrails than ever. At DeepIntent, we enable audience strategies built for regulated healthcare advertising, helping brands reach relevant patient and provider audiences in scalable, compliant, and explainable ways aligned with modern privacy expectations.

In healthcare, targeting must connect brands with condition-relevant audiences, caregivers, or appropriate provider groups in a responsible way. As the ecosystem evolves, we’re seeing growing momentum toward cohort-based approaches and cleanroom-enabled workflows that support addressability while reducing dependency on any single identifier.

As patient behavior becomes more digital-first, what makes CTV particularly effective for reaching and engaging health audiences compared to traditional TV or other digital channels?

Healthcare decisions are high-consideration, emotional, and often made over time; CTV combines the storytelling power of television with the control of digital to support that journey. Compared to linear TV, it gives healthcare marketers more precision around who they reach, how frequently they reach them, and how they adapt messaging over time. And compared to many other digital environments, CTV delivers a premium, full-screen experience with stronger attention, which matters when the message needs to be clear, trusted, and compliant. Ultimately, CTV allows brands to move beyond broad demographics and toward strategies rooted in relevance.

Measurement in healthcare advertising can be complex. What advancements has DeepIntent made to help marketers better understand the impact of CTV on audience quality, engagement, or health outcomes?

Healthcare has a different definition of performance than most categories. It’s not just about going after clicks. Pharma marketers care about audience quality (AQ), verified patient reach, provider reach, script lift – such as new-to-brand prescriptions (NBRx) and total prescriptions (TRx) – and cost per verified patient (CPVP). Increasingly, they need near real-time visibility into those signals so they can understand and optimize performance while campaigns are live, not weeks after they end.

DeepIntent is focused on helping brands move toward real-time, outcome-oriented measurement that answers more strategic questions:

• Did the campaign reach the right audience?
• Did it drive meaningful downstream engagement?
• Can we connect exposure to real-world outcomes in a privacy-safe way, quickly enough to inform smarter decisions?   

How does scaled access to premium, transparent CTV supply enhance performance and efficiency for healthcare advertisers?

Premium CTV supply matters for every advertiser, but for healthcare, it’s a non-negotiable. Pharma brands pay premium CPMs and, in return, need premium environments, real transparency, and reliable scale. Without that, they risk wasted impressions, inconsistent delivery, and running in environments that don’t meet the brand’s standards.

Scaled access to high-quality, transparent CTV supply improves performance by enabling:

1. Less waste, with each impression intended to drive measurable health outcomes.
2. Better frequency management for regulated messaging.
3. More defensible media through verified delivery.
4. Greater insights and flexibility to optimize campaigns in-flight.

When transparency and scale come together, healthcare marketers can drive more efficient reach and be more intentional with every ad dollar.

What challenges around privacy, fragmentation, or identity still exist for healthcare marketers adopting CTV? And where do you see the biggest opportunities for the ecosystem to solve them?

CTV still has real friction points, especially for healthcare marketers. Identity fragmentation across publishers and platforms can make it difficult to execute consistent targeting and measurement at scale. At the same time, privacy expectations continue to rise, and the ecosystem has to balance addressability with responsibility.

The opportunity is to keep building infrastructure that makes CTV buying more interoperable and more privacy-safe, including:

• Clearer verification standards.
• Identity solutions that don’t rely on over-collection.
• Cleanroom-enabled activation and measurement workflows.
• Supply paths that scale without sacrificing control.

Healthcare advertising depends on trust. The long-term winners will be the partners that make it easier for brands to drive outcomes without introducing privacy or compliance risk.

Looking ahead, what innovations or emerging trends do you believe will most shape the future of CTV in healthcare advertising over the next few years?

Outcomes-first planning will be the default. Healthcare marketers will expect CTV to prove impact through healthcare-relevant metrics like audience quality, verified reach, and Rx lift—not just delivery.

Privacy-safe audience strategies will also become non-negotiable. Cleanroom-enabled workflows and cohort-based approaches will expand as brands look to scale precision without increasing compliance risk.

Finally, supply transparency will evolve into a true performance lever, with brands prioritizing premium, verified environments and transacting through trusted partners like Magnite that make high-quality supply easier to buy, optimize, and trust.