Precision Doesn’t Mean Small: Redefining Scale in Biopharma Video Targeting

Jul 27, 2026 | Jessica Daigle

Historically, biopharma marketers have approached video planning with an inherent tradeoff in mind: scale versus precision. But today’s most effective strategies embrace a new lens on precision. “Precision isn’t by definition small or tiny or niche,” says Cullen Deady, senior vice president at PMX Lift. “It’s knowing exactly who you’re reaching, or in the inverse, knowing who you’re not reaching.”

This visibility reduces guesswork, enables more efficient investment in reaching audiences most likely to convert, and ultimately requires a change in campaign execution.

Digital video: Data-driven targeting without sacrificing scale

Broad demographic targeting on linear TV has long been the default path to awareness, but how audiences consume media has fundamentally changed. With the rise of digital video, marketers now have unprecedented opportunities to deploy data-driven targeting without sacrificing scale. As a result, media plans no longer need to be built around the notion that to achieve precision, you must sacrifice reach.

However, the catalyst for this shift isn’t just where audiences are consuming media, but the accuracy with which we can engage them. Health audience targeting has reset the benchmark for campaign performance, rendering demographic targeting outdated. In fact, a Veeva Crossix meta-analysis revealed that campaigns using health audience targeting delivered twice the conversion rates of demographic targeting on the same platforms—effectively doubling new patient starts.

Shifting to audience-first activation

By adopting health audience targeting as the foundation for video activation, marketers can make this shift. Crossix uses an enhanced demographic approach that leverages longitudinal health data to identify relevant audiences. This allows marketers to confidently increase the relevance of every impression delivered across platforms.

The result is a new way of thinking about scale. By understanding how audiences consume content, marketers can use high-quality environments to naturally scale their footprint. Kaitie Coghlan, senior vice president of data product & partnerships at NBCUniversal, and her team have taken on a new motto: precision by choice and scale by default.

“We’ll partner with Crossix to target an audience until impressions are exhausted, and then we waterfall to content where that audience overindexes,” she explains. “Through this method, we maintain precision while seamlessly scaling into broad content environments.”

The power of partnership

While the industry shift toward precision is underway, audience-first activation requires a new approach to media execution. Strong partnerships and the right activation infrastructure are now essential to campaign success.

Amazon Ads’ principal business lead, Jeff Mendelsohn, recommends working as a united front with a weekly cadence for optimizations and partner collaboration. “By getting together early and often, we can work hand-in-hand with agency and data partners to apply new tactics as things like creative fatigue set in,” he says. “There’s a lot more success to be had when we collaborate closely to leverage real-time results and learnings early on in the process.”

In practice, translating this collaborative mindset into results requires operationalizing the activation infrastructure. When data providers, media companies, and agencies work in lockstep from the beginning, optimization ceases to be a hurdle and becomes a strategic lever for maximizing brand value.

Navigating the future of video

Video advertising is moving beyond the traditional tradeoff between reach and precision. By using health audience targeting as the foundation, marketers can move past the balancing act and embrace an audience-first approach where scale and precision comfortably coexist.

As this shift takes hold, one idea continues to gain clarity across the industry: precision does not mean small—it’s smarter.

Ready to move past the traditional tradeoff between reach and precision? Read 3 Strategies for Audience Targeting Success to learn how to scale your precision targeting and drive high-impact results.