A strategic preview for Scott — where biotech buyers actually concentrate, how to capture the Super Bowl cultural moment without paying for the TV spot, and what $200–400K builds across 9 weeks.
Five pharma brands ran ads in Super Bowl 60. Pharma stole 9% of overall engagement. And the most successful 2026 healthcare campaign didn't pay for a TV spot at all — it ran adjacent to the moment.
Pfizer ran a Super Bowl TV ad in 2025 and got hit with congressional and patient-advocate backlash. For 2026, they deliberately skipped the $8M+ in-game spot and instead launched an oncology-focused brand campaign the same week as the game, capitalizing on the cultural moment without paying the in-game premium.
Their CMO went on the record: "Having received backlash, Pfizer doesn't need the super high-impact placement to become top-of-mind for consumers." They shifted budget to surround the moment, not be in it.
This is functionally what Scott's brief asks for — and it's the playbook we'd recommend executing on. Super Bowl LX TV spots ranged from $8M to $24M for a single 30-second placement. Plan B at $320K buys 9 weeks of phased presence in front of biotech buyers, with brand-lift measurement included. Different impact, different math, dramatically different ROI for a brand-building objective.
And the numbers behind why this works: Super Bowl spots are roughly 20× more impactful than regular TV ads in shifting brand perception, driven by elevated audience attention. Pharma brands airing on NFL games are 69× more effective than average broadcast prime-time. The cultural attention is real. You just don't need to buy the broadcast slot to participate.
The places where pharma and biotech decision-makers concentrate. Our footprint in each, sellable today, at residential, office, and point-of-care venues.
Biotech corporate brand-building works when it reaches multiple decision-points. Our venue mix covers each.
Build awareness, peak at Super Bowl week, sustain through post-game cultural conversation.
Brand foundation. "Innovation, trust, the future of healthcare." Editorial-grade creative establishes corporate identity before the Super Bowl noise. Lower frequency, broader exposure across all biotech-cluster metros.
The cultural moment. Frequency 4× the build phase. Daily share of voice in elevator lobbies during the week leading up to and following the game. The TV-OOH echo effect — your brand reinforces in offices what consumers see during the broadcast.
Sustained presence through the post-Super-Bowl conversation cycle. JPM Healthcare Conference aftermath, Q1 biotech earnings season. Cultural relevance compounds when other brands stop talking and yours doesn't.
Each one solves a different version of your brief. Plan B concentrates spend where biotech buyers concentrate. Plan C goes wider, trading depth for national reach.
Our reporting scales with your spend. At Plan B ($320K) and Plan C ($380K), your client unlocks the Outcomes tier — the most complete reporting suite in our network.
A brand-building campaign at this scale doesn't get evaluated on impressions. It gets evaluated on the behavioral and attitudinal lift you can document afterward. Here's the industry evidence that anchors what Plan B can deliver.
Pharma brands airing on NFL games are 69× more effective than average broadcast prime-time. The audience attention is qualitatively different around the cultural event.
You don't need to pay the $8-24M to harvest that elevated attention. Adjacent media in the same week captures the halo at a fraction of the cost.
// Source: MediaRadar, EDO Inc., 2026
68% of patients have requested a pharma brand by name after exposure to point-of-care media. 65% indicated willingness to switch brands based on POC messaging.
58% of patients who notice in-office ads ask their physician about the advertised treatment. 91% say POC ads support being more active in their own care.
// Source: Solomon Partners 2025 Point of Care Report
Lumen-validated. That's 2× the recall threshold and 2.5× the average digital advertising attention window. Captive environment, sound-off, no phone signal — undivided audience.
Across 9 weeks of phased flight, 436 screens, with peak loop share during Super Bowl week, that compounds into roughly 15 million engaged-attention impressions — not glance-level passings.
// Source: Lumen Research, VI venue panel
Novo Nordisk's Wegovy: 11.4× web search lift on game day vs. month-prior daily average. Hims & Hers: 4.7×. Cross-channel digital signal is documentable and attributable.
For a brand-building campaign, the brand-name search lift is your most defensible cross-channel KPI alongside the impression and brand-lift work.
// Source: Verve for Advertisers, Feb 2026
For a $320K brand-building campaign, "impressions delivered" isn't enough. Plan B includes a full measurement stack modeled on what leading pharma DOOH partners deliver — designed so your client can defend the spend to their CFO and CMO with the same data.
Honest answers to the objections any sophisticated agency or client will raise. Better to surface them now than litigate them on the call.
Worth raising on the call. Stan Kroenke (SoFi owner) is currently suing Inglewood over billboards near the stadium to protect Super Bowl sponsor exclusivity. And Novartis became the NFL's first official corporate pharma partner in March 2025.
Plan B and C concentrate spend in biotech-cluster metros, not Inglewood — so the Clean Zone risk is minimal for our recommended approach. But if any LA-adjacent activation comes up in scope, your client's legal team will want to review NFL category exclusivity before the flight starts.
Super Bowl 30-second spots cost $8M–$24M. Plan B at $320K buys 9 weeks of phased presence with brand-lift measurement included. Different math, different objective.
The TV ad is a single-moment cultural impact play. Our campaign is a sustained-presence play that compounds across many exposures per audience member. If your client wants the TV moment, they should buy the TV moment. If they want sustained brand presence among biotech buyers — this is the better tool.
Captivate is the larger network — roughly 24,000 screens to our 6,400. They lead on scale and ABM targeting. We lead on curation, on point-of-care inventory, and on residential context.
For a B2B-pure office buy, Captivate may be a strong partner. For a multi-venue campaign that reaches biotech audiences across office + clinical + residential contexts, our network mix is closer to what your brief actually needs. We're often run alongside Captivate, not against them.
Fair question. Our office and POC venues are concentrated in the markets where biotech buyers concentrate — Cambridge MA, South San Francisco, NJ pharma corridor, RTP, San Diego, NYC, DC/Bethesda. We can share property-level tenant data on the discovery call.
For ABM-style verification of which specific biotech companies occupy which buildings, that's a standard data point we provide in the final proposal once we know which audiences to verify against.
Highly. The 9-week phased structure is our recommendation, not a constraint. We can shorten the flight to 6 weeks, intensify the Super Bowl peak to 8/16 loop, drop or add specific clusters, swap individual buildings, or shift creative refresh timing — all without breaking the math.
On creative: specs are 1920×1080 silent video or static (5–30s). 5 business days from creative delivery to launch. Free creative refresh between phases. Multi-variant testing supported.
DOOH in 2026 is the privacy-first channel. Our screens display creative to ambient audiences — we don't collect, track, or process PHI or PII at any point. No cookies, no pixels, no device identifiers needed for delivery.
Brand lift measurement is survey-based with consenting respondents in matched panels. Search and social lift are aggregate-level metrics. Compatible with your client's HIPAA + privacy posture from day one.
VI inventory can be activated programmatically via Vistar Media, Hivestack, and Place Exchange as PMP (Private Marketplace) or Programmatic Guaranteed deals if your client's media operating model requires it.
For a campaign of this scope, we'd typically recommend direct-IO for the planning precision (which buildings, which phases, which creative goes where) — but programmatic activation is fully supported.