As patients and healthcare professionals alike increasingly turn to artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini rather than traditional search engines for online research, pharma marketers will need to significantly shift their strategies to ensure their digital marketing materials continue to reach the right people at the right time.
That’s according to Will Reese, chief innovation officer at Inizio Evoke, who spoke with Fierce Pharma Marketing during last week’s Fierce Pharma Week conference in Philadelphia.
Reese pointed to data showing that a majority of internet searches are now “zero-click,” meaning users get their answer from a results page—whether that be from Google’s “AI Overview” feature or from dedicated AI engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity—without clicking through any further. Separate studies, meanwhile, have shown that many of those AI-generated answers found at the top of a results page are often incorrectly cited or flat-out wrong.
“You’re getting thinner, inaccurate information,” Reese said, suggesting that adding the depth and accuracy back in will require marketing and communications teams to work across silos to consolidate their “aggregate presence.”
“One of the things we’ve talked a lot about with clients is this idea of presence: How do you have optimal, credible presence? That’s what’s going to influence the models,” he continued. “So that goes back to, am I showing up in the right places? Do I have accurate citations? Am I looking at things holistically?”
Key to achieving that optimal presence, per Reese, “100%, is looking at your communication strategies very differently”—planning across teams to ensure credibility and consistency across all channels.
Somewhat ironically, that planning process may actually incorporate AI tools that can help to analyze a company’s share of presence and share of model, the latter of which describes how visible a brand is to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
Despite the challenges that the growing popularity of LLMs poses to pharma marketers’ brand visibility, there are still some silver linings.
“It does force you to actually really appreciate people,” Reese said. “Though it’s technology, the more you understand what humans need, what they look for, the answers that they’re seeking, you actually design better content.”
There’s plenty of content out there that “doesn’t actually answer a need,” he said, but paying attention to how people are using AI search tools can help marketers create “well-crafted, smart content” that’s actually helpful to patients.
As he explained, using traditional search engines typically looks like typing in some keywords, clicking a few links, then repeating the process with tweaks to the keywords until a user gathers enough relevant information. With LLMs, many users are typing in “full stories,” with plenty of information about their demographics, symptoms and overall experience, in search of an AI-generated answer that thoroughly addresses their specific situation.
“The more you can understand that and the stories that people have, the complicated questions, and predict their answers, the better content you create, and it’s good for everybody,” he said. “That content, no matter where it lives, is valuable, but you’re going to get a benefit because it’s more likely to show up in ChatGPT and the other engines.”
Ultimately, Reese leans toward LLMs like ChatGPT being more friend than foe to pharma marketers.
“I think access to information is super valuable,” he said, drawing a comparison to how the growth of social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok similarly expanded users’ access to helpful health information.
“There is information on rare diseases, there’s information on life hacks, there’s information on things that people can do that was not accessible even two years, three years, certainly 10 years ago,” he said, though he reiterated, “If you’re not that credible and you don’t have that bit to it, that’s where it can go in a bad direction.”