What Adobe Summit Reminded Me About Pharma’s Biggest Missed Opportunity
Adobe Summit Day 1 Reflection
I came back to Adobe Summit this year after a few years away. A lot has changed, and a lot of what I heard in Day 1 felt less like a reveal and more like a reckoning.
Relevance is a data problem. And we are rich in data.
In the Day 1 Strategy Keynote, Kelly Mahoney, CMO of Ulta Beauty, talked about staying relevant in the discovery process and how Ulta’s first-party data creates a strategic advantage that benefits both the customer and the brand. When Ulta knows you well, they show up for you better. And that’s 100% transferrable to healthcare marketing.
Pharmaceutical brands have a treasure trove of first-party data too. Patient support program enrollment. HCP engagement history. Access and adherence touchpoints. But too often it sits disconnected and siloed, lacking the taxonomy needed to make it actionable.
W’ve been talking about “data democracy” for over a decade—long enough that it’s not even a buzzword anymore. But in the age of AI, it’s actually possible. We can consume and act on data at a scale and speed that was out of reach five years ago. And our customers—patients, caregivers, and HCPs—already expect us to show up with always-on, individualized content. They’re not grading us on a pharma curve. They’re grading us against every other experience they have as consumers.
Relevance at scale: a lesson from retail worth borrowing.
Ulta CTO Mike Maresca spoke about relevance and scale in content—exactly where pharma struggles most. We too often default to the lowest common denominator because personalization at scale feels cumbersome. But patients and HCPs are the same human beings who get a hyper-personalized email from a retail brand minutes or hours after browsing. They notice when we’re talking at them instead of with them.
As Lianne Ramos, Senior Program Manager at Adobe, put it, every brand will face cultural moments with a short window to respond for impact, and whether you can move in that window comes down to whether your content, data, and systems are ready. That’s what experience-led adoption with built-in velocity looks like in practice. Trust, access to support, and adherence aren’t just outcomes; they’re the result of operating models that balance speed with compliance and creativity with accountability.
The standard we should hold ourselves to.
Let’s hold ourselves to the same CX expectations these same consumers have of the retail and CPG brands we support across Publicis Groupe. Not as an aspiration, but as a baseline.
When we get that right, we don’t just move metrics. By embracing data and AI to enable contextual content, we better support patients in starting and staying on therapy, caregivers in navigating a complex system, and HCPs in making confident decisions. And we drive real business impact for the brands we shape.
The tech is ready. The data is largely accessible. The question is whether we’re ready to build the operating models that let us move at the speed our customers demand and deserve.