There’s a conversation I find myself having repeatedly. It goes something like this.
A senior communications leader – talented, experienced, and genuinely committed to their brand – tells me about the content strategy they’ve just signed off. It involves a major congress, a campaign-style promotional film, a suite of digital assets, and a social media plan. The budget is significant. The ambition is real. And when I ask what happens in the six months after the congress, there is a pause.
“We’ll start planning the next one,” they usually say.
This is the omnichannel pipeline problem in pharma. And it isn’t really a content problem. It’s a systems problem – one that consumer businesses solved a decade ago, and that the world’s most influential news organization’s live or die by.
The gap between pharma and everyone else
Walk into the marketing department of any major consumer or news brand and you will find something that most pharmaceutical communications teams don’t have: a content operating system. A structured, always-on pipeline that turns every brand moment and every newsworthy moment – a product launch, a campaign, a seasonal event – into a thread of content that runs continuously across every channel their audience uses.
The logic is simple. Consumer brands understand that trust is built through repeated, consistent exposure over time. A single powerful campaign creates a moment. A pipeline creates a relationship.
Pharma knows this intellectually – and so do the often-frustrated leaders I work with every day. The challenge is that the regulatory environment, the siloed structure of most organisations, and the sheer complexity of multi-market operations have
created a default mode that looks like this: plan for the moment, execute the moment, recover from the moment, repeat.
And when I say recover, I mean it. Getting a single piece of content out of the door in a pharmaceutical company is a herculean task, and I have genuine respect for the teams that keep pushing the envelope of what’s possible.
The content that gets made is often good enough. The system for deploying it – and keeping it working – almost never is.
In advertising they call it sweating the asset. In newsrooms, every piece of footage is repurposed time and again to fit the needs of an ever-evolving, news-hungry audience. News archives are our global historical visual library – think of the moments before JFK was assassinated, England winning the World Cup in 1966, Neil Armstrong’s first tentative step on the moon. Those images exist because someone was there, filming, with intent.
Now imagine the lifecycle of a new treatment where not a single detail was captured on film. No record of the breakthrough moments. No record of the scientists who made it happen. No record of the struggle to make a difference to people’s lives. And no visual record on which to build public trust and understanding.
That is the cost of not having a pipeline.
What consumer businesses figured out
The shift that transformed content strategy in consumer industries wasn’t about creativity. It was about architecture.
The best consumer brands stopped thinking about content as a series of campaigns and started thinking about it as a pipeline – a record of human effort making their products real in the world. A chance to bring their audience on the journey. Every piece of content was designed from the outset to exist in multiple formats, across multiple channels, over an extended period of time. A single source moment – a product launch, a founder interview, a live event – became the engine for weeks or months of downstream content.
More importantly, they built the internal infrastructure to support it. Editorial calendars, content libraries alongside clear channel ownership. Defined formats that could be produced quickly and consistently without starting from scratch each time.
And right now, there is an extraordinary role for AI to play – supporting companies in logging, storing and making content more searchable and usable than ever before. The archive becomes an asset. The pipeline becomes self-reinforcing.
Pharma, for the most part, is still commissioning content the way it commissioned print advertising in 1995. One brief, one agency, one deliverable, one moment.
Where video fits – and why it’s being wasted
This is where I want to be direct, because it’s the part of the conversation that frustrates me most.
Video is the most powerful content format available to pharmaceutical brands right now. HCPs consume video. Patients consume video. Payers and policymakers consume video. The appetite is there. The technology to distribute it has never been
more accessible. And pharma – an industry sitting on some of the most compelling human stories in the world, stories of scientific breakthrough, of patients whose lives have been transformed, of clinicians at the frontier of their field – is systematically underusing it.
The problem isn’t production. Pharmaceutical brands are spending significant sums on video. The problem is deployment. A documentary-quality film gets made, screened at a congress, uploaded to a brand portal, and quietly forgotten. The interviews that didn’t make the final cut are never repurposed. The congress sessions that could have been filmed weren’t. The KOL who gave a brilliant five-minute explanation of the mechanism of action did it once, in a meeting room, and it was never captured. Only for a different team to commission exactly that video in six months’ time, at huge expense and additional effort.
Video, used properly, is not a campaign asset. It is a pipeline asset. A single well-filmed congress can generate a primary broadcast programme, ten short-form expert interviews, five patient perspective clips, three disease education pieces, and a year’s worth of social content – all from the same three days, all built around the same story thread.
That is what system-level thinking looks like applied to video. And it is what almost no pharmaceutical brand is currently doing at the scale the global market demands.
The right hands on the wheel
I want to be clear about something before I go further, because this matters and it’s often overlooked.
Building a video pipeline isn’t just a commissioning decision. It’s a strategic one. And one of the biggest risks I see pharmaceutical brands take – often without realising it – is handing that pipeline to whoever is available, rather than whoever understands what they’re building.
The freelance community in film and video production is extraordinary. Some of the most talented people I have ever worked with are freelancers – I was one myself for the better part of fourteen years – and they are the backbone of almost every production, including ours. This is not a criticism of freelance talent.
But talent behind a camera is not the same as strategic understanding of a brand, a disease area, a regulatory environment, or a long-term content architecture. Someone can shoot beautiful footage and have no idea how it fits into a pipeline, what a Medical Affairs team needs from an HCP interview, or why a particular cut will never clear compliance.
A video pipeline needs someone driving the bus. Someone who understands the brand deeply enough to make editorial decisions on the ground, and who brings a genuinely outward-looking perspective – because the audience consuming this content deserves the same storytelling quality as anything on Netflix or the BBC. Brands need a team working with them intimately: people who know what the footage needs to do not just today, but six months from now, across five markets, in three different formats.
Without that, you don’t have a pipeline. You have a very expensive collection of hard drives.
The question worth asking
I am not suggesting this is easy. The regulatory environment is real. The organisational complexity is real. The resource constraints are real.
But the question I would put to any communications leader reading this is not “can we build a content pipeline?” It is: “what is it costing us not to?”
Every congress that ends without a content strategy. Every expert voice that goes unfilmed. Every story that gets told once and disappears. These are not just missed communications opportunities – and don’t get me started on the underused soft power of storytelling in pharma! They are very real missed commercial opportunities: moments where your brand could have been building presence, trust, and share of voice in the disease areas that define your future.
The consumer world has figured this out. Pharma has a long way to go. We believe that the brands building content systems first will own the conversation.
