Independent analysis of the structural decisions behind healthcare media planning, written to make strategy more explicit and reviewable.
The questions a senior strategist needs answered before audiences, channels, or budgets are chosen. Built for brand teams starting a launch and for agencies that just won an integrated brief.
A meaningful share of programmatic HCP spend never reaches a verified prescriber because the identity match breaks. Treat match quality as a budget line, audit it quarterly, and make vendors prove it.
The supply side reorganized around a few platforms this year. Map who controls each authenticated path, where paths overlap, and score each one with no stake in the answer.
The US CMIO and department-head universe is a list, not an audience. Reach and CPM are the wrong metrics. What changes when the buyer can be named, and what to do instead of a conventional digital buy.
A practical evidence contract for separating observable activity, licensed estimates, client inputs, inference, and unknowns before they become a media recommendation.
The failure mode is almost always structural, not executional: unvalidated audiences, measurement instrumented too late, and channel mix determined by vendor availability rather than prescriber logic.
When three vendors produce three different attribution stories, the problem is not the data, it is the governance. Attribution is a decision-making problem with a structural solution, set before launch.
Selection made under time pressure and relationship history, without documented criteria leadership can review, produces fragmented stacks, overlapping capabilities, and accountability gaps that survive for years.
Every platform with a stake in spend has an incentive to recommend its own channel. A platform-neutral point of view changes the conversation by making those incentives and trade-offs visible.
The audience definition problem is upstream of everything else. If the NPI framework was built by the vendor who benefits from a larger list, reach looks impressive while prescriber quality stays unvalidated.
Most governance documents are written during planning and ignored during execution. The designs that work use explicit decision rules, clear accountability, and optimization triggers that do not require consensus every time.
A structured evaluation for identifying gaps across Audience, Channel, Spend Logic, and Measurement, before a planning cycle locks in the wrong assumptions. Useful before annual planning, an agency review, a channel recommendation, or a launch checkpoint.
Open the diagnostic →The Cadence method and licensed products show how these ideas become repeatable decision systems.