Big Pharma borrows a page from pro athletes' marketing playbook

Imagine you're one of the best athletes in the world, say, a top 10 sprinter or an Olympic-calibre swimmer. Your VO2 max is absurd, your resting heart rate is somewhere between "deep sleep" and "legally dead", and you've dedicated the last 20 years to shaving milliseconds off your time.

Congratulations! Unfortunately, unless you're unusually charismatic, dating a popstar, or accidentally say something controversial on social media, few people outside your sport care. You may be a generational talent, but you’re also functionally invisible.

This problem, the inability of raw merit to generate attention, has a well-known solution: hire professionals. Athletes employ marketing agents, PR teams, and personal brand consultants not because they’re egotistical, but because they’re pragmatic. Talent doesn’t speak for itself unless someone is paid to give it a megaphone.

Pharmaceutical companies are in a similar situation, although, with more FDA memos and fewer protein shakes. Drug development is a brutally expensive process, often costing north of $2 billion per medication. And, like our fictitious Olympian, many of these drug combinations, despite being clinically brilliant, struggle to get noticed, understood, or prescribed. The reasons are obvious in retrospect: healthcare communication is saturated, risk-averse, and riddled with jargon. Scientific precision makes for bad copy.

Data and diagrams

So, pharma tried what scientists always try first: more data. More studies, more endpoints, more scientific posters. This had the expected result: extremely accurate messaging that no one read.

Eventually, marketing budgets ballooned to match the scale of the problem. Some sources estimate that by 2025, US pharma marketing will exceed $30 billion annually. In theory, this is enough money to ensure every American dreams in mechanism-of-action diagrams. In practice, the spending often hits diminishing returns, constrained by a regulatory environment in which every sentence must pass through three compliance reviews and a ritual sacrifice to the ghost of the 1997 FDA Modernization Act.

Even still, some pharmaceutical companies are starting to adapt. A good example of this is the way Pfizer handled its pneumococcal vaccine, Prevnar. In the beginning, the campaign was forceful and attention-grabbing, but unfortunately it was also wasteful and overdone. Although Broad TV and radio spots spread awareness, much of the campaign's reach evaporated before it had the chance to reach the people who needed it most.

Pfizer shifted the campaign when it switched its messaging delivery to be deliberate, measured, and targeted. By using personalised digital outreach and focusing their efforts on patients and physicians most impacted by pneumococcal disease, they fostered engagement in the right environment.

This pivot, from general awareness to precision targeting, mirrors what successful athletes do when they stop chasing follower counts and instead build a consistent persona. Not just “fast”, but “fast and relatable”, “fast and good with kids”, “fast and advocates for mental health”. The key insight is segmentation: nobody is universally compelling, but everyone is compelling to someone.

Of course, pharma's version of this is harder. Not because pharma marketers are less competent, but because they're playing defence instead of offence. There are rules. You can’t say your drug works better than the competitor unless you have head-to-head data. You can’t imply off-label benefits. You must monitor adverse event reports, even if they come via social media platforms like TikTok.

Fresh thinking and DTC

This doesn’t make precision marketing impossible, just more technical. Here’s where the analogy to athletes becomes useful again. The best in the world don’t work despite constraints; they work with them. Sprinters don't complain about the track's dimensions, so marketers shouldn’t complain about the FDA.

The recent DTC push for pharma companies, like Eli Lilly’s Lilly Direct for diabetes treatments, demonstrates what’s possible. Instead of mass-deploying the same advertisement to every patient with a pancreas, they used available data to separate audiences, fine-tune language, and provide a highly targeted approach to DTC marketing. The pitch wasn't just medically sound, it was intelligible, timely, and emotionally calibrated.

As a society, we do not need more reckless storytelling. Instead, this is a call for competent narratives that respect both the audience’s intelligence and the FDA’s limitations. Big Pharma should bring in behavioural economists, narrative designers, and possibly even the odd novelist, to fine-tune each message to the right frequency without dumbing down the intended message.

In short, big pharma needs to utilise the equivalent of a sports agent. A third party who understands how the game works, the incentives of the audience, and how to increase engagement rates.

Because here’s the secret: drugs don’t sell themselves. Neither do generational talents. Both need interpreters. And if an elite athlete without a PR team is an underutilised asset, so too is a breakthrough therapy buried in a PDF no one reads.

Pharma’s next big leap won’t come from the lab. It’ll come from outside the lab, where the rules of narrative, attention, and segmentation have already been solved; just not by the people you’d usually think of pharma to hire.