The trend: Due to the Trump administration's crackdown on direct-to-consumer (D2C) pharma advertising, drugmakers face a greater need to develop strong strategies to effectively reach the healthcare professionals (HCPs) who prescribe their treatments.

Editor’s note: This article pulls information from our just-published “Physician Marketing 2025” report.

Catch up quick: A memorandum signed by President Donald Trump in September instructs the FDA to propose rulemaking that would require D2C prescription drug promotions to disclose all side effects and risks in-ad. This would likely drive many pharma companies to pull some ads due to lengthy disclosures being costly and not viewer-friendly.

Why it matters: Patients will often ask their doctors to prescribe a specific medication after learning about it through a TV ad. Fewer D2C drug ads would mean fewer patients learn about treatments through TV ads and ask their doctors to prescribe a specific medication.

• Pharma accounted for about 13% of estimated national linear TV advertising spending in Q3 2025, ranking No. 1 among industries tracked by iSpot.tv.
• And these efforts have proven effective: Among patients who spoke with their doctor about a medication they saw advertised, 50% received a prescription for that drug, according to a January 2025 KFF poll.

What pharma marketers should do: Pharma marketers must balance the resulting drop in consumer awareness of medications with significantly increased educational efforts aimed at HCPs.

They’ll need to adapt to HCPs’ online behaviors and preferred channels for receiving medical information. Time-pressed doctors are increasingly preferring to engage with healthcare and pharma content online, including webinars, online medical videos, social media, and podcasts. On average, HCPs spend just 16% of their weekly medical reading time with print resources like medical journals, per a July 2025 M3 MI study.

To foster credible connections with HCPs, pharma marketers will want to:

• Format digital content for busy physicians. Use easy-to-scan tables and charts to spotlight key data like trial results versus competitors and real-time patient response to treatments. Treat niche podcasts as tools for brand building and condition education—not direct promotion.
• Combine AI-driven segmentation with HCP-specific content formats to personalize outreach. AI can help tailor messaging based on clinical specialty, sidestepping generic marketing. Use compliant analytics tools to track how physicians engage with various forms of online content and stay flexible to allow for campaign adoption in real time.

Go deeper with the full report for data-driven insights on how physician preferences for consuming pharma content are evolving, as well as actionable recommendations for pharma marketers.