Tackling the Big Challenges in Pharma Marketing Today

What have been some of the biggest challenges facing pharma marketing teams in 2026 so far, and how can commercial teams adapt to ensure a competitive advantage?

In this latest episode I sat down with Olly Johnston, EVP of Platform Growth and Transformation at Supreme Group, and Kelli Gauss, Director of Marketing and Growth at Pivot Design (a Supreme Group company), to discuss how they are tackling some of the industry’s biggest challenges.

Together they dig into AI adoption and how to actually realize its value, weigh in on when omnichannel is the right fit for a business, and look ahead to the looming drug patent cliff.

They also touch on staying creative amid tightening regulations and possible solutions to the shrinking access sales reps have to HCPs.

Read on for an edited Q&A of our conversation, or watch the episode in full above, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Cutting Through the AI Fog

Eric: What do you think the biggest barrier is to pharma companies adopting AI?

Olly: With something as seismic and transformative as AI, adoption is highly complex. It presents a kind of fog that clients have to reach into and pull something out of, before they even know what it’s going to look like. So it’s natural for them to think, “Let’s run short, provable pilots we can scale over time.” The irony is that a pilot often takes just as long and demands just as many resources, which in some ways defeats the whole purpose of innovation.

With AI, you need a bit of guts to manage that risk profile and take a larger swing, because that’s where the big jumps in value come from. It’s a scary move, and it doesn’t come easily in pharma, where everything is mired in governance and protocol. That’s why it’s often beneficial to make that move alongside people who know both AI and the sector inside out.

Kelli: One thing I’m seeing is that brand teams in pharma are increasingly being asked by leadership to do more with less, and they’re often being pushed to use AI without knowing how to apply it to get the best results. As an AI-native agency, a big part of our job is showing them how we use it ourselves, and coaching them to get more out of it too.

Another barrier is that AI produces a lot of noise. You can generate a really detailed report in moments, which is exciting, but it puts the pressure back on the user to work out, “Okay, what do I actually do with this?” Again, this is where our teams add real value. We understand the client’s commercial priorities and the business context and we can layer on our human expertise and turn that raw AI output into actionable insights.

Staying Creative as Compliance Tightens

Eric: There’s always been a tension between creativity and compliance in pharma. What guidance do you provide to companies navigating that?

Kelli: As a creative agency, it’s something we think about constantly, and it’s changed a lot. There’s more scrutiny now, and the industry is seeing untitled letters go out on a regular basis. The key is to treat those potential roadblocks as a reason to think differently. For example, rather than staying constrained within traditional formats and channels like product marketing ads, which are heavily regulated, we advise companies to think about the other routes they can use to reach their audience.

With this in mind, we also try to take a step back and think about what the patient actually needs. There are always opportunities for product marketing, but disease-state education, symptom control, and everything else that comes with managing a condition matter just as much. Some of the best work we’ve done recently has been community-driven and patient-story-driven and this approach can mitigate some of the compliance challenges.

Olly: I agree. Clients often default to, “We need to invest in telling our clinical profile story and talk about the product as much as possible.” But that’s usually where there’s the least white space. Going beyond it, into unbranded and community development, is increasingly where the real commercial opportunity to stand out tends to be.

Eric: Operationally, what can organizations do to help protect themselves from the impact of tightening regulations?

Olly: The single most useful move is to stop storing approved creative as finished assets and start storing it as components. Most teams keep their approved work as whole pieces, for example a complete ad, a full brochure. The problem is that one rule change from the FDA invalidates the entire asset, and you rebuild and re-review it from scratch.

If you take a modular approach and break that same creative into tagged, individually approved components instead, a rule change only affects the specific pieces it touches. Everything else stays approved and usable, and you simply recombine around the gap. That’s the difference between reacting to a regulatory change in days versus weeks.

This type of modular approach is exactly where AI earns its place, and it’s where we’ve seen some of the strongest results with our platform Supreme Intelligence. It helps clients atomize their creative and organize it, so when the rules shift, they can adapt much more quickly.

Getting Omnichannel Right

Eric: Olly, you’ve worked in omnichannel for around a decade. What would you say are the main challenges that pharma companies face in mastering it today?

Olly: A lot of our clients in pharma have been sprinting to realize an omnichannel vision, to adapt to the behaviors and expectations of modern consumers. To bring that to life, there’s been a lot of investment in specific areas, teams and capabilities. For example, building out deep MarTech stacks, great data capabilities, or a large content store.

What a lot of these clients have realized from these efforts is that, in some ways, it’s actually created more silos. The teams involved aren’t really connected to a common commercial goal that can move a brand or a business unit forward. So even though they’ve built all of the pieces and the capabilities, they are now having to step back and say, “What are the true commercial outcomes we are targeting and do we need to come together as an integrated team to deliver?”

With this in mind, there are four things I always advise clients to work out before implementing an omnichannel strategy. One, do you have media that can genuinely flex to fuel programs that are always-on and omnichannel? Two, do you have the data triggers and connected channels to orchestrate experiences as close to real time as possible? Three, when it comes to data transfer, do you have the right partners or in-house integration so that you can actually act on the data the way you’d want to? And four, most crucially, what change management processes do you have in place?

On that last point, it takes a village to execute an omnichannel strategy properly. This isn’t multichannel, where teams can work in silos and still succeed. It’s a genuinely new way of working, and you have to unite people around shared goals and processes.

Kelli: It gets even harder when the audiences are smaller. In rare diseases, for example, data fragmentation can seriously undermine omnichannel. So, to Olly’s point, understanding your infrastructure upfront is critical.

Marketing Beyond Loss of Exclusivity

Eric: We’re entering one of the biggest loss-of-exclusivity windows in pharma history, with a wall of revenue coming off patent between now and 2030. How should commercial teams in pharma be thinking about marketing in 2026?

Olly: Almost every category is becoming more commoditized, with fewer novel treatments and more generic options. The big shift over the past five years is brands working out how to differentiate beyond the product’s value alone. Scientific differentiation will always be paramount, but it isn’t the only way to hold onto loyalty.

I regularly push clients to think about patient support in ways that transcend the competition, to solve for continuity of care, and to make access and prior authorization genuinely easy for office staff and physicians. Those areas sit outside traditional product marketing, and they move a brand from differentiating on science alone to being seen as a partner.

Kelli: I agree. Commercial teams need to start building brand equity now, earning trust and securing loyal HCPs and patients before exclusivity runs out. Patient support programs are one of the best ways to do that, because they offer patients more than just the therapy. It’s a huge opportunity, and it can’t be an afterthought.

Reaching HCPs as Rep Access Declines

Eric: Rep access to HCPs keeps declining. Some brands are going fully digital-first, while others are doubling down on field sales. What are your thoughts on this?

Olly: I think about this in two ways. First, that you need a strong data strategy to get the most out of limited human resources. If you use data to read the signals across different systems of care and identify which doctors’ offices actually have patients who might need a specific drug, you can target rep visits and make every visit count.

The second piece is that you can now create the illusion of a much larger field force with synthetic AI reps. It’s a way for brands to extend their reach, and it’s interesting and slightly terrifying in the same breath.

Kelli: Building on this, there are digital-first ways to reach HCPs, so having a team that can help with a digital channel strategy really matters.

In our experience, creating demand with brand marketing on the patient side can also be effective. We had a client who had to cut their field force almost to zero, so the burden of generating demand moved entirely to the marketing and brand team. Rather than reaching prescribers through reps, we used social media and other channels to reach patients directly, helping them understand there was an option they could ask their provider about.

The Key Takeaways From Our Conversation

The challenges facing pharma marketing in 2026 are varied, and no single tool or approach solves them all. But as Olly and Kelli laid out, pharma companies can gain a competitive edge with a few consistent principles:

1. Integrate before you invest further. Connect fragmented teams and tools around shared commercial goals and processes before adding more to the stack.
2. Be bolder with AI. Small, “safe” pilots often cost as much time and resources as larger infrastructural changes, but will deliver less of a return.
3. Make compliance a creative advantage. Treat new regulatory scrutiny as a push to think even further outside of the box, looking beyond traditional channels to reach your target audiences.
4. Differentiate beyond the product. Patient support, continuity of care, and easy access are often the white space where a brand can stand out.
5. Build brand equity ahead of the patent cliff. Earn HCP and patient trust now, rather than scrambling once the generic options arrive.
6. Let data and technology extend your reach. Use data to target limited rep time precisely and lean on digital and AI-enabled channels to reach HCPs, and generate demand directly with patients when field access shrinks.

Want to hear the full conversation? You can find it on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.