The 2025 way forward: What can UK healthcare advertising expect?

Buoyed by growth opportunities and the strengthening economy, 2024 turned out to be an interesting year for the United Kingdom’s (UK) healthcare advertising industry. With focus on emerging technologies, we saw it playing a pivotal role in helping healthcare professionals (HCPs) offer improved patient outcomes.

The increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Big Data in advertising initiatives further propelled the industry forward, helping it undergo a major transformation last year. And with UK’s private healthcare industry set to grow at a CAGR of 2.9% between 2024-2034, marketing efforts within the region are only set to intensify in the coming months and years – CAGR of 5.1% between 2023-2031.

Going into 2025, we expect pharma brands and their advertising partners to use past learnings – and, more importantly – understanding of the key market trends to help not just the industry, but the larger healthcare ecosystem in the UK scale new heights. Here’s a look at some of these key trends.

Focus on value-based care

The idea of value-based care is quickly taking centre stage for most growth-related discussions in the healthcare industry. This is because as a model it rewards HCPs and healthcare institutions for providing quality care and improved patient outcomes instead of offering a greater number of services to achieve financial goals. However, in the context of the United Kingdom and the National Health Services (NHS) ecosystem, value-based care adopts a far greater role, as it also takes upon the burden of getting the most value out of healthcare spending by optimising patient results and minimising unnecessary procedures.

With the NHS – and HCPs under its umbrella – already moving towards the adoption of a value-based care system, pharma brands and their partners too have started to work towards practices that help HCPs achieve this goal. As such, in 2025, we expect advertisers to increasingly favour methods of HCP engagement that seamlessly integrate into clinical workflows, leveraging both operational and marketing technologies to drive meaningful outcomes for patients and ultimately reduce the cost of operation for the system. Any such approach will prioritise efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring that engagement strategies align with real-world healthcare delivery.

Since this is a patient-centric approach, omnichannel experts will likely place both HCPs and patients at the centre of their strategies. Rather than focusing solely on commercial success, they will design campaigns that foster trust, enhance patient outcomes, and provide genuine value to medical professionals. By embedding marketing efforts into clinical workflows, a more organic and impactful presence can be created, ensuring that messaging supports better decision-making and improved healthcare experiences. This shift highlights an industry-wide move towards ethical, responsible messaging – one that balances business objectives with the broader goal of advancing patient care and supporting HCPs effectively.

Increased adoption of AI

In 2025, the focus on AI is set to increase, with the industry poised to leverage the many benefits that AI-based solutions offer. For example, AI-powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools are allowing marketers to analyse large volumes of data to understand HCP behaviour.

In 2025, tools such as these will gain more relevance and with increased spending on AI and the overall increased use of AI models, we can expect significantly improved results for both HCPs and patients in a multitude of ways. From speeding up administrative tasks to improving patient outcomes through solutions that offer contextually relevant nudges at the right time and place to the right HCP, AI solutions are set to change how the pharma advertising industry works, and how advertisers involved market their offerings in the days ahead.

Identifying patients at high risk of missing medication or not adhering to prescriptions is a big problem for the healthcare system as it ultimately leads to increased procedural and administrative burden in the long-term. In the coming months, we are likely to see AI take the lead on this front by helping identify and predict such patients to improve communication with them. Through hyper-personalised campaigns – backed by analysing patient data, preferences, and behaviours – patients will be able to get personalised wellness plans, medication reminders, and mental health support, thus improving overall outcomes and reducing long-term burden on the system.

Unlocking the power of big data and ML

Machine Learning (ML) is expected to serve as the backbone of all great things that we expect Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring to healthcare marketing in 2025. Leveraging the power of Big Data, pharma brands and their partners will use large medical data sets in a GDPR-compliant manner to help improve the clinical workflows of HCPs and improve patient outcomes. Marketing efforts will benefit from real-time monitoring of patients through wearable devices and sensors, which can collect continuous patient data that can, in turn, be used by machine learning algorithms to provide real-time insights into health status and potential complications.

Much of this data will also be used to improve hyper-personalisation of messaging, making the patient prescription process more efficient as well as improving operational efficiency, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes. Apart from this, ML is also set to help the industry analyse large data sets to gain deeper insights about the evolving healthcare sector, social trends, and customer profiles. Information gained from these initiatives could then again be run through predictive analysis models, which can then be used to anticipate consumer needs and preferences for creating messaging that’s both relevant and engaging.

Increased scrutiny on data security

With data playing a central role in all things AI and ML, we are set to see increased scrutiny around data security in 2025. Thanks to the presence of interconnected systems at play, HCP and patient data will be collected from multiple sources, including EHR systems and telehealth portals.

Democratisation of this data within teams will become crucial for ensuring success of advertising initiatives. However, with multiple parties at play, handling of this data wouldn’t be a straightforward task. Those involved in the process of handling and ensuring democratisation of data collected from patients and different points of the clinical cycle within the tightly controlled structure set up by bodies such as the NHS will present their own challenges. One of the key points of concern for all involved will be keeping a close eye on the flow of this sensitive data, and then eventually safeguarding it in a way to avoid any regulatory transgressions.

Thus, going forward, the challenge for marketing geniuses will be to reach important financial goals, all while navigating the murky waters of regulatory guidelines around data security. The only way forward would be ensuring strict adherence to the Data Protection Act and relevant NHS regulations. Compliance of these guidelines will become an important point of consideration to ensure the credibility of all dealing with sensitive patient health data. Apart from this, keeping important data secure from external threats such as cyber criminals will also become a key point of concern for healthcare institutions as well as pharma advertisers.

Point of care advertising to become bigger

Point of Care (POC) advertising in the healthcare sector has been around for a while, however, in the UK pharma brands haven’t used it actively to maximise their goals yet. This is despite POC strategies offering great rewards for pharma brands effectively employing them to reach HCPs at critical junctures of the clinical decision-making cycle. In 2025, we see this changing with POC advertising tools likely to become more popular amongst advertisers.

Much of it will be fuelled by the unique nature of this strategy that allows it to offer relevant messaging to HCPs in ways that become part of their value-based care initiatives, and in turn offer better patient outcomes. The use of AI and machine learning will further improve the quality of interactions between marketers and HCPs, thus enhancing the value and perception of this strategy. POC advertising strategies will also gain from them becoming more effective through increased efficiencies in the message delivery systems and hyper-personalisation of the messaging at play.

Improving patient outcomes the ultimate goal

While the above-mentioned trends are expected to shape the growth story of the healthcare marketing industry this year, the true driving force behind the efforts will be the attempt to improve patient outcomes. From an increased focus on POC messaging and value-based care to the expected rise in use of AI-based tools, the growing demand for quality healthcare by patients is going to spur advertisers to constantly come up with new and innovative ways to keep helping HCPs improve patient outcomes in 2025.