By Sam Bradley. This story was originally published on Glossy’s sibling publication Digiday.
More consumers are looking to over-the-counter solutions to everyday healthcare needs. In response, marketers working to gain share in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector are borrowing from the modern CPG playbook and altering their approach to paid media.
OTC sales rose to $58.2 billion in 2025, up from $44.3 billion the previous year. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signaled its willingness to allow more drugs to switch from prescription access to OTC. In basic terms, consumer demand and regulatory change mean that pharmacies and DTC firms are playing a greater role in everyday consumers’ health.
“Historically, people relied more on their physicians,” explained Sandy Weag, client president, CMI Media Group. “[Now] people are taking a much more proactive approach to their health, and are making product decisions as a shopper, similar as they would any other consumer product.”
That change means that pharma and healthcare companies need to earn and retain the trust of consumers making those decisions via the medium of a strong brand. To meet that goal, marketers at consumer healthcare firms like Opella have adopted strategies first devised for CPG brands.
“You have to ensure that your credibility and your scientific rigor is respected, but at the same time that you are embracing brand building,” said Opella chief growth officer Albert Hernandez, who refers to the company’s category as “fast moving consumer healthcare.” The business was spun out of Sanofi over a year ago, creating an €825 million ($927 million) business overnight; the French pharma giant retains a 48% stake. Though commercial results are not published — Opella is a private company — the first half of 2026 saw net sales increase 3.6%, fueled by e-commerce growth, according to an Opella spokesperson.
In media terms, that means investing more in retail media, creator marketing, paid social and search as Opella attempts to gin up its DTC business in markets around the world. Hernandez said the company’s e-commerce sales had grown from 4% of its revenue to 12% over the last three years.
“We have to embrace a new way of operating,” said Hernandez. “If I believe I’m going to do that using the traditional pharma model of 30-second TV ads, that’s not going to work.”
Hernandez, a CPG marketer who spent 17 years at Nestlé prior to joining Sanofi’s consumer business in 2020, said that 60% of the company’s media investments now lay in digital channels, with 40% remaining with pharma favorites such as television or out-of-home (he didn’t provide specific budget estimates).
To manage that shift, he said the company hired more e-commerce talent and senior CPG marketers, like chief sales officer Victoria Tiffin, who was brought over from Procter & Gamble in July. Her appointment followed the hiring of former Reckitt exec Gonzalo Balcazar, who was made president of Europe and Latin America in March, while Murali Rao, previously of Reckitt and dairy giant FrieslandCampina, was appointed brand and innovation head for Africa, the Middle East and Turkey.
It’s built up an 85-person in-house team designed to use generative AI tools to swiftly spin up digital creative assets and handle versioning, following a trail first laid out by CPG firms like Unilever. It’s also brought more of its search and programmatic media investments in-house. “It has made us much faster,” said Hernandez. “It has increased our ROI significantly.”
Opella isn’t the only firm embracing a CPG-esque approach. Fellow pharma spin-out Kenvue is also competing for market share, while DTC healthcare firm Hims & Hers ran a Super Bowl ad in February. And ad spend forecasts suggest the pharma sector’s digital ad spend is set to reach $26.3 billion this year.
For Hyun Lee-Miller, chief media officer at Good Apple, healthcare brands’ transition toward social and creator marketing made sense “When people make personal health decisions, they trust peer-to-peer lived experiences more than traditional ads,” said Lee-Miller.
“Patients increasingly expect the same kind of access, choice and convenience they have in other parts of their lives, and go-to-market strategies are adapting to that,” said Lee-Miller. “Digital tools have given people much more autonomy, and as physician access shrinks, brands are also investing more in multichannel patient campaigns that can reach and educate consumers throughout that decision-making process.”
Borrowing from the CPG recipe book has brought novel challenges to healthcare marketers’ doors, however. With the company leaning harder into retail media, Hernandez noted Opella now had to navigate that sector’s peculiar frictions — including debates over which teams control retail media investments.
Hernandez and his team must also stay ahead of shifting user behaviors unleashed by the advent of AI search, via LLM citation and visibility monitoring. “AI is becoming a major gateway to health information,” he said.
Weag noted that more pharma and healthcare firms were increasing their spend on performance-oriented channels, drawn by the same pull factor of measurability as CPG marketers. “We are seeing a lot more media moving to channels where there is more immediacy in terms of measuring sales… that expectation, I’d say, is across nearly every client we work with,” she said.
That lean could lead the firms following Hernandez’ “FMCH” playbook onto a shoal. CPG marketers are already consumed by the balancing act of growing their brands over the long term, and the need to present measurable success to CFOs or skeptical C-suites.
Furthermore, the huge CPG brands founded on mass market techniques aren’t, as it happens, doing so well; CPG firms underperform relative to the S&P 500, while NielsenIQ recently found that American grocers and supermarket sales of food and CPG products fell by 9.3 billion units over five years.
As they respond to changing consumer healthcare habits, marketers like Hernandez will have to decide which lessons to take from the CPG world — and which ones to leave.
