MM+M has partnered with Swoop for the industry's premier look inside marketing budgets for 2025. The study is based on a survey of 113 director-level or above respondents working in pharma, biotech, and medtech.

The past five years have seen marketing budgets bounce around a bit. Because we're dealing with a small market and relatively small "n" values for surveys we have to be careful not to "chase error" when looking at these numbers.

When uncertainty rises the trend is to regroup on brand.com and we seem to be seeing a small amount of that in 2025 with branded up and unbranded down.

Here we see a rush to HCP marketing with it receiving the most increased budgets. That said, the "decrease" category is quite low for these professional activities so the other work isn't necessarily being cut.

HCPs aren't alone in the "budget increase" crowd, patients are also getting more fiscal attention. The group that looks like it might suffer in 2025 are patient advocacy groups but even here the lion's share of marketers say budgets are remaining the same.

When asked what HCP initiatives were getting additional spend, professional social media is at the top of the list. This is increase, mind you, not absolute spend. Reps and MSLs are still getting a good portion of budget, just not growing as much.

This MM+M article is full of charts, tables, and data. It really deserves a fresh cup of coffee and a solid 30 minutes of thought on how it relates to your therapeutic market.

For this reason it gets the slightly-incorrect-but-still-sought-after Klick Wire Must Download (must read -Ed.) award.

ixLayer and Ipsos surveyed 414 US patients with chronic conditions in January to get a view into what they value in digital health. Unsurprisingly, they heard "money." We'll investigate this plus the perhaps more interesting second layer of features patients look for in digital platforms.

The number one message patients have for pharma is "help me pay for these drugs." When asked what services they would value most affordability and access (which is another term for cost for many patients) show up first.

Even when the survey didn't ask about pharma specifically, money came first, then all the other features that patients would like to see in digital solutions.

Number two on the patient hit list for digital solutions is convenience. With 86% already using digital health solutions of one type or another, the audience is getting more sophisticated in what they want. 

This part of the survey was asking specifically what services pharma could provide that would help patients perceive them more positively. These results are the top two boxes out of five. Again, help with insurance and payment are the top two items.

We're being a bit over the top here with our stressing of the cost responses, but it's important for pharma to not ignore the elephant in the room. All aspects of payment, out-of-pocket, and insurance are important and that is the world our patients live in. That said, this report makes the case that convenience consistently runs second to cost.

Grab the original for a lot more data on digital health usability, communications features, and speed of access to care.

Accenture surveyed 300 US-based C-suite healthcare executives from provider organizations to get insight into how they are approaching AI.

The top two opportunities with AI are efficiency and potential revenue growth.

The result of opportunities is outcomes and these are essentially the same as the opportunities.

Regardless of internal efforts, C-Suite executives are saying they need external help to implement the AI tools needed to tool up and realize the potential gains of the technologies. 

Advice for anyone with an AI focus inside one of these companies: make sure the CTO knows what you're doing. The CTO was slightly higher than the others for in-house expertise and the entire team will celebrate anything that can be done in-house for a fraction of the cost of external experts.

SocialInsider has released its 2025 benchmarks for LinkedIn and the results are interesting for Pharma in the US where we can run HCP-directed branded ads. Fun fact, Klick's social strategists have a list of over 100 HCP-oriented branded and DSE properties on the platform, reply to this email if you'd like to discuss.

Polls get a lot of attention on the platform and the algorithm rewards larger accounts that post them. They dominate all other post types for impressions.

Polls are engaging and have the built-in payoff of showing the audience the answers when they answer.

Note: it's not surprising that "social media" led this poll, it was on LinkedIn, after all.

While Polls get a lot of attention in the feed, the leaders for engagement are multi-image posts and documents, an exclusive content type to LinkedIn. We compared some of the post types to Instagram to highlight the high engagement shown by the LinkedIn audience.

While Multi Image posts get the most engagement as users scroll through the content and Polls get the highest impressions, the easier post types are still the most common. Here we show the ratios of post types created by LinkedIn accounts.

Contentsquare looked at metrics on its platform for 90 billion web sessions across 6,000 global websites to see how engagement was faring in Q4 2024. Unfortunately it was down year-over-year for all but two industries.

As we can see, Contentsquare doesn't have a pharma or medical category so we are only interested in the averages in this report. Here, mobile is nearly three-quarters of the site visits.

Website owners need to work hard to keep their mobile visitors engaged. The small screen is quicker for visits but since it controls so many visits it is critical for success.

Highlighting search marketing as the websites' top paid source is like saying water is wet. The market is shifting though with AI summaries absorbing some user sessions that would otherwise turn into visits. Still, in 2024 search brought a larger share of visits than in 2023.

A 38-page survey of ambient scribe technologies in 2025 comes away with the "more research needed" mantra for ROI. However, all indications point toward HCPs liking the technology.

The "net-net" summary of the findings was consolidated in this chart that highlights four areas where positive impact is being felt.

If you read nothing else, look at the summary tables on pages 25-28. These really provide a "lay of the land" in the industry in 2025.

55% of Americans say that the way they search for information on brands and products has changed. These numbers reinforce that. They are the highest "social discovery" numbers we have seen to date. When asked how they discover new brands and products, Gen Z and Millennials said Social.

The generational disparity across social media as a brand discovery channel is high, but notice the aging Gen-Xers are still over 50%. The Boomers got sunk a bit by being tied with the Silent Generation.

This chart also shows that non-digital channels are alive and well. Retail stores and word of mouth made strong showings across the board. While this is for general retail and not healthcare it is still directional for our industry.

Search users (which is pretty much everyone) are now looking to the platforms (let's be honest... Google) to give more up-to-the-minute information. 

With 74% of respondents saying they have made a purchase from a review site we can see that they are popular. The numbers saying they use such sites have crossed 50% for the younger generations.

Pharma isn't immune from the review site trend. Drugs.com provides reviews, as does Sermo for HCPs, and Reddit has a subreddit for nearly every condition.

When looking at Apple Search Ads in its App Store, MobileAction compiled data on the different categories of apps. Health was a solid "middle-of-the-pack" for tap-through-rate (TTR).

TTR has increased for the iOS ecosystem in 2024 overall, making mobile search advertisers happy.

We say this nearly every time we run a story on mobile apps. Your brand likely doesn't need one. Patients want simplicity more than a plethora of apps clogging their devices. Instead, partner with an industry leader and get functionality onto their app.

Pinterest worked with Magna to do a deep dive into how platform positivity influences ad receptiveness. The brand almost certainly wants to position itself as the more positive alternative to the more mainstream platforms.

This might even partially explain Facebook's reintroduction of the "friends only" feed on its aging platform.

However, creative is a much larger driver of success than platform.

Trustworthiness was the largest indicator of success on a platform. The report designers left it out of these charts so we helpfully added it back in (are you ever not sarcastic? -Ed). 

The report's main point was that positivity is also an important element of platform success. Interestingly, the report never shows the main social platforms against these metrics, maybe that's "data on file." 

When the same creative was shown to respondents on platforms they marked for positivity, the researchers found a substantial increase in interest and trust (numbers are an index, not absolute).

Talk to your Pinterest rep to see if they can give you a "behind the scenes" view of this data by platform.

We originally found the Positivity study on this Emarketer page. It provides interesting context and shows how the smaller platform is expected to grow to 2027.

Also from Emarketer, here is a chart of small business and which platforms they tend to use.

The differences in mental and physical health are exactly what you think they would be: younger Americans have lower mental health and older Americans have lower physical health.

Inside those numbers are some shocking variations. Young womens' mental health was exceptionally low in 2024 (all numbers are the group that responded "excellent").

Meanwhile, physical health is naturally lower for the older age groups, both men and women.

This report was generated with data from Harris Poll. Two-thirds of Americans report that they have experienced physical symptoms triggered by financial issues.

The symptoms run the gamut from sleeping to more serious issues (hey, trouble sleeping is a very serious issue, we should know -Ed.).

The types of healthcare services that are postponed or cancelled outright can be quite serious.

This topic is quite relevant for patient DTC and worth a look.