Disease-awareness DTC campaigns used to require a linear TV budget and a 30-second spot built for broadcast standards. CTV changes both. We build household-targeted streaming campaigns that reach caregivers and patients by content affinity, clear fair-balance and ISI review without slowing your launch, and prove out media efficiency before you scale spend.
The Problem
Linear TV minimums shut you out
National broadcast and cable buys carry six and seven figure minimums built for blockbuster brands with mature commercial teams. A Series A or growth-stage asset doesn't have that budget, and it doesn't need national reach. Most companies in this position either skip TV entirely or overpay for a media plan sized for a much bigger drug.
Broad reach wastes spend on the wrong households
Linear TV buys impressions by daypart and network rating, not by who is actually affected by the condition you treat. You end up paying to reach millions of households with zero connection to the disease state, while the caregiver and patient households you actually need sit buried in the same buy.
Fair-balance and ISI requirements don't shrink for shorter formats
Streaming ad units run 15 or 30 seconds, sometimes less, but the same fair-balance and Important Safety Information obligations apply as a full broadcast spot. Marketing teams without a regulatory-tested creative process either cut corners on ISI display, which invites a warning letter, or default to a slow, risk-averse approval cycle that kills the launch timeline.
No feedback loop to prove the spend is working
Traditional TV media buys report gross rating points and reach, not what happened after the ad ran. Without a connection between CTV exposure and downstream signals like site visits, HCP locator searches, or enrollment inquiries, marketing teams can't defend the budget in the next board meeting, and the CTV line item becomes the first thing cut.
How We Help
We start with your patient and caregiver profile, not a media plan template. That means pulling together what you already know from claims data, patient advocacy partnerships, and prior DTC efforts, then mapping that to the streaming content categories and platforms where those households actually spend time. A rare disease caregiver watching true crime and home renovation content is a very different targeting problem than a general population awareness campaign, and we build the plan around that difference from day one.
From there we build a household-targeting strategy across the CTV platforms that support content-affinity and contextual targeting without requiring patient-level health data, which keeps you inside HIPAA and platform compliance guardrails. We select platforms based on inventory access to your specific audience segments, not on which vendor has the biggest sales team, and we build in frequency caps so you're not burning budget on the same households ten times over.
Creative production for CTV is a different discipline than broadcast. We build 15 and 30-second cuts designed around a compressed fair-balance and ISI display that meets legal and regulatory review standards without eating half the ad unit. We run creative through your med-legal-regulatory process in parallel with media planning, not after it, so approval isn't the bottleneck holding up launch.
Measurement is built in from the first flight, not bolted on after the fact. We connect CTV exposure data to your website analytics, HCP locator tool, and any enrollment or inquiry forms, so you can see which households saw the ad and what they did next. That gives you a real signal to optimize against instead of a reach number that means nothing to your CFO.
We run flights in phases, starting with a smaller geographic or platform test before committing to a full national buy. This lets us validate that the household-targeting approach is actually reaching the right caregivers before you scale spend, and it gives us real performance data to renegotiate platform rates once we know what's working.
Throughout the campaign we report on media efficiency, audience composition, and downstream engagement on a cadence that matches your internal reporting cycle, so the CTV line item has a defensible story every time budget gets reviewed.
The result is a streaming media program sized for where your company actually is: enough reach to move a disease-awareness goal, without the minimums and waste of a national broadcast buy.
What we deliver
- Household targeting plan mapped to caregiver and patient content affinity, built from your existing patient data and platform-available audience segments
- Compliant 15 and 30-second CTV creative cuts with fair-balance and ISI display reviewed through your med-legal-regulatory process before launch
- Phased media flight plan starting with a test market or platform subset before full-scale commitment
- Measurement dashboard connecting CTV exposure to site visits, HCP locator activity, and enrollment or inquiry form completions
You don't need national reach to move a disease-awareness metric. You need the right few hundred thousand households, and CTV is the only channel that lets you buy exactly that.
Our Methodology
We run every CTV engagement as a 90-day sprint, split into three phases. The first 30 days are audience and creative: building the household-targeting profile, drafting compliant creative, and getting med-legal-regulatory sign-off before a single dollar of media spends. The next 30 days are a test flight, usually in a limited geography or on a subset of platforms, with weekly checks on delivery pacing and early engagement signals.
The final 30 days is scale and optimization. We take what the test flight showed us about which platforms and content categories actually reached the right households, reallocate budget toward what worked, and build the reporting package your team needs to defend the spend going into the next budget cycle.
This isn't a one-time media buy. It's a repeatable system: audience data gets sharper every flight, creative gets tested against real engagement instead of guesswork, and the media plan compounds instead of resetting from zero each quarter.
How We Work
Days 1-30: we build the household-targeting audience profile using your existing patient and caregiver data, select CTV platforms based on inventory access to that audience, and run creative through your regulatory review process. Nothing goes to media until compliance signs off.
Days 31-60: we launch a test flight in a limited market or platform set. Your team gets weekly pacing and delivery reports, and we make targeting adjustments in real time rather than waiting for a post-campaign report to find out what worked.
Days 61-90: we scale spend into the platforms and audience segments that performed in the test flight, and build out the measurement connections between CTV exposure and downstream site or enrollment activity so you have a real efficiency story, not just a reach number.
On our side, you get a small team: a strategist who owns the audience and platform plan, a creative lead who owns the compliant ad units, and a measurement lead who owns the reporting connections. You are not handed off to an account coordinator after signing. Weekly check-ins are standard, with ad hoc calls whenever a regulatory or platform issue needs a same-day answer.
- A household-targeted CTV media plan sized to your actual budget, not a linear TV minimum
- Compliant creative that passes med-legal-regulatory review without slowing the launch timeline
- A measurement connection between ad exposure and downstream engagement that you can defend in a budget review
If your biotech & pharma company needs connected tv advertising leadership, we should talk.
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Frequently asked questions
How much does a CTV advertising engagement cost for a biotech or pharma company?
Strategy and creative work with Winston Francois typically runs $15,000 to $40,000 per month depending on how many audience segments and platforms are in scope. Media spend is separate and scales with your goals, but CTV lets you start meaningfully smaller than a linear TV buy, often in the low six figures for a first test flight rather than the seven figures a national broadcast campaign requires.
How long until we see results from a CTV campaign?
The 90-day sprint is built to get a test flight live within 30 days and real performance data by day 60. You won't see a full disease-awareness lift in that window, but you will know which platforms and audience segments are actually reaching your caregiver population, which is what lets you scale spend with confidence instead of guessing.
Do we need our own media buying team, or does Winston Francois run the buys directly?
We run the platform relationships and media buying directly as part of the engagement. If you already have an internal media function, we plug into it and take ownership of the CTV-specific strategy and compliance work, since that's a different skill set than a general digital media buyer typically has.
How is this different from working with a traditional media agency?
Most media agencies build CTV plans the same way they build display or social plans, optimizing for reach and CPM without accounting for fair-balance and ISI display requirements or the caregiver-specific targeting a disease-awareness campaign needs. We build the regulatory review into the creative process from day one and size the media plan around household targeting instead of gross impressions.
How do you measure ROI on a CTV campaign when there's no direct purchase to track?
We connect exposure data from the CTV platforms to your website analytics, HCP locator tool, and any enrollment or inquiry forms. That gives you a real signal, households that saw the ad and then took an action, instead of a reach and frequency report that tells you nothing about whether the campaign moved anyone.
Is our company a good fit for a CTV advertising program?
This works best for Series A through growth-stage biotech and pharma companies with a defined patient or caregiver population and a disease-awareness or DTC goal, but without the budget or commercial infrastructure for a national linear TV buy. If you can describe who your caregiver household looks like and what content they watch, we can build a targeting plan around it.
