Responding to Uncertainty: Policy and the Investment Opportunity Ahead
For senior healthcare marketers, our current state of affairs presents both a regulatory reckoning and a strategic inflection point. Legacy models of direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing that were once seen as central to awareness-building and branded engagement are increasingly vulnerable. Bipartisan political appetite for reform paired with state-level legislative change are threatening long-standing advertising channels across TV, streaming, and digital media.
The imperative is not to panic, but instead pivot, as was recently talked by cross-industry experts at the annual POC NOW Summit (watch the panel).
Healthcare brands and their agency partners now face a critical strategic choice: retreat and reduce visibility, or reallocate and reinvest in channels that are already aligning with the future of healthcare engagement. Point of Care (POC) marketing is not a secondary option or a compliance workaround. It is a resilient, deeply contextual, and trust-driven channel built for the modern healthcare journey. And, it is increasingly one of the strongest bets in the entire marketing mix.
POC’s strength lies both in its legal defensibility, and also in its unique ability to meet patients at high-attention, high-intent moments alongside providers. It is where brand messaging transforms into patient empowerment. It is where adherence begins, shared decision-making happens, and trust is formed. As the recent POC NOW Summit made clear, it is also where marketers can push forward, rather than pull back.
In this article, we will explore how recent regulatory shifts are changing the healthcare advertising calculus, why Point of Care is emerging as the most strategic place to invest next, and what healthcare marketers must do now to build resilience, relevance, and results that last.
DTC Disruption: What’s Happening and Why It Redefines Healthcare Marketing
For decades, direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical advertising has acted as the visibility engine for branded drugs—dominating TV, radio, print, and digital platforms with condition awareness and branded engagement. But that model, once seen as untouchable, is now facing growing instability.
The current administration has tapped into longstanding public skepticism toward the pharmaceutical industry, using it as a highly visible lever in its broader political strategy. As Tish Pahl, Principal at OFW Law, points out:
"You can’t assume this is red vs. blue. There is bipartisan alignment against DTC advertising. Pharma is an easy target."
Her observation offers a striking reminder: while pharmaceutical marketing is an easy political target, the underlying issue runs deeper. There is a wellspring of public distrust and concern that marketers must take seriously. In a healthcare environment that feels increasingly unstable, rebuilding trust and strengthening patient understanding must become strategic imperatives.
Public sentiment, already skeptical, is being stirred to new levels. During his campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged to ban pharmaceutical advertising on television through executive order—a promise that, while extreme, resonated across both populist and progressive audiences. Now, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy’s position grants him not just a platform but procedural influence. Alongside a Trump administration eager to use executive action as both a policy tool and political signaling, the threat to DTC is no longer speculative; it is materializing.
Waiting out the term is not a strategy. The risk to pharmaceutical advertising extends beyond this administration. Across the aisle, figures like Senator Bernie Sanders have long supported efforts to curb DTC, citing price gouging and consumer exploitation as justification. Politics are representative, and the skepticism now transcending party lines is unlikely to recede. It draws energy from a wide spectrum — from influencer-driven wellness advocates to anti-government activists — and will likely shape future policy cycles regardless of party control.
This puts the burden on the industry not only to mitigate reputational damage, but to seize the opportunity to reexamine how it relates to and engages with people. The question is no longer just how pharma advertising goes to market, but how it defines the relationship between brand, provider, and patient.
However the industry chooses to evolve, the need to pivot is urgent.
Jim Potter, Executive Director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication, warned at the POC Now 2025 Summit that the goalposts are already shifting:
"Think again if you believe this will just be about linear television."
Potter emphasised the broad language taking aim, which clearly is not contained to DTC. State-level bills are surfacing with language that aims to prohibit “any promotional communication targeting consumers.” Oklahoma’s SB771 (4A’s, 2025), for instance, lays out definitions that could implicate everything from programmatic ad placements to email outreach. Connecticut and Texas have introduced near-identical bills.
As Potter noted, the replication of language is not accidental.
"This isn’t random. Someone is feeding this language across state lines to keep the issue burning."
For healthcare marketers, this evolving climate demands more than incremental adjustments. It requires a strategic rethinking of how brands engage patients, shifting toward models that are credible, contextual, and resilient to political and regulatory pressures. Channels that foster personal, trust-based messaging, delivered through the authority of care providers, are best positioned to meet both immediate needs and long-term consumer expectations on brands.
Beyond Policy: The Structural Risk to Marketers
Even the anticipation of policy change can be its own form of disruption. While legislative proposals carry real consequences, the greater challenge may lie in how the threat itself alters internal marketing behavior. Regulations take time to enact but the slowdown they trigger can begin immediately, and often goes unnoticed in the shuffle.
In day-to-day operations, that uncertainty adds to the instability. Teams delay launches, hedge media investments, and pull back on campaigns that might attract scrutiny. Even without a formal ban, the prospect of one is already reshaping brand strategy.
Among the less visible, but no less impactful, consequences of regulatory anxiety:
- Media planning paralysis as teams await clarity
- Budget hedging that weakens message frequency and consistency
- Delayed or downsized initiatives driven by risk aversion
These reactions are understandable. But if left unaddressed, they risk undercutting years of patient engagement and brand trust. Marketing leaders must act quickly to sustain both momentum and morale by building adaptive strategies that keep the marketing machinery moving, while also addressing the uncertainties that may be slowing their teams.
As Jim Potter, Executive Director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication, warned at the POC Now 2025 Summit:
“Even if an executive order were issued, it wouldn’t take effect overnight. But that interim? That’s where marketers lose nerve, and agencies lose momentum.”
For senior leaders, regulatory uncertainty is not a moment for retreat. Beyond exposing regulatory risk, the volatility is exposing overreliance on vulnerable, high-visibility channels that may be losing public favor across parties.
Strategic portfolios should shift toward:
- Channels less exposed to sweeping political interpretation and cultural skepticism
- Contextual placements that support clinical engagement and build trust
- Environments pre-aligned with legal precedent and contextual and meaningfully supporting care delivery
This is where Point of Care stands out — not only as a durable channel, but as a forward-facing, clinically relevant investment aligned with long-term brand integrity.
Why Point of Care Is the Strategic Investment for All-Weather Reach
For brand leaders and the agencies that support them, this moment offers an opportunity to grow, not just to pivot to the next safest option. This is not a siren’s call, but a beacon of marketing strength, urging brands to invest in a channel that supports clinical relevance and long-term confidence in the brand. The writing is on the wall, along with something else: a growing tome of feedback from increasingly engaged consumers. People are actively seeking trusted sources, leaning into health and wellness, and embracing new formats and care settings to make informed decisions.
One area that isn’t net-new, even as it continues to evolve, is the Point of Care. Unlike untested channels that require new tech stacks or lengthy development, POC builds on existing systems, partnerships, and clinical workflows. It is innately attuned to healthcare engagement: experience-centered, context-aware, and credibility-driven.
As Kim Maney, Assistant General Counsel at Glaxo Smith, shared at the POC Now 2025 Summit:
“What’s special about Point of Care is the directness, the personalization—meeting the patient and the HCP right in that moment of decision.”
Expanding on a few areas of value are three reasons Point of Care is uniquely positioned to lead in today’s healthcare marketing landscape:
1. Alignment with Patient Expectations
Today’s healthcare consumers are proactive participants. They want to understand their options, weigh risks and benefits, and collaborate with their providers. Education is a primary interest—when it is accessible, relevant, and respectful of their role in decision-making.
Patients expect marketing content to contribute meaningfully to their knowledge by offering:
- Personalization: Messaging that reflects their specific condition, demographics, or treatment path
- Contextual timing: Information delivered when it matters most—at moments of consideration or decision
- Support for dialogue: Materials that invite two-way conversation, enabling patients to ask informed questions and make confident choices
Point of Care addresses these expectations by integrating educational messaging that supports both patients and providers. While a longstanding channel, it naturally aligns with modern needs and sensibilities—especially in non-linear, patient-driven health journeys where traditional DTC often struggles due to its distance from the clinical context. In fact, this alignment is precisely why POC has traditionally been deployed at the conversion stage of the marketing funnel, even though its strengths in building awareness and driving retention are often undervalued.
2. Integration into Clinical Workflow
Point of Care enhances healthcare experiences, epitomizing contextual marketing. It operates within environments where patients are already focused on their health and more receptive to relevant information, including:
- In waiting rooms, pharmacies, and clinics
- Through digital health platforms tied to care delivery
- Integrated with Electronic Health Records (EHR) and point-of-service interactions
As Kim Maney observed:
“Point of Care materials help anchor healthcare information in patients’ minds because they are delivered when patients are already thinking about their health.”
This context-rich setting improves awareness, strengthens comprehension and retention, and drives follow-through, delivering full-lifecycle value. It supports a more natural and effective engagement model grounded in the patient’s real-time experience of care.
While the term “holistic” is gaining traction in healthcare conversations, it is often misunderstood. This isn’t just about alternative therapies. It reflects a broader expectation that health communications consider the whole person: their condition, context, and capacity for action. In marketing, that is called personalization and strategic delivery.
3. Legal and Ethical Strengths
When properly designed, Point of Care communications are educational, balanced, and integrated into medical decision-making. They can also be tailored to reflect the expectations of both patients and providers, delivering information that is relevant, accessible, and actionable.
This positioning brings structural advantages such as:
- Alignment with FDA expectations for fairness, accuracy, and clarity
- Greater resilience under First Amendment protections for commercial speech
- Reinforcement from state constitutional guarantees for non-misleading health communication
Instead of avoiding scrutiny, Point of Care rises to meet it. Its role within the care continuum lends it a level of credibility that mass-market channels often struggle to sustain under political or legal pressure. Just as importantly, it supports the ethical distribution of health information in ways that are adaptable to literacy levels, cultural context, and the unique behaviors and beliefs that shape care experiences across populations, life stages, and communities.
Strategic Realignment Playbook: What Marketing Leaders Can Do Now
The case for Point of Care is clear. Next is execution. For senior marketers, this moment demands more than reactive adjustments. It requires a confident shift from vulnerable mass-market tactics to durable, experience-centered strategies built for the realities of 2025 and beyond.
The following playbook outlines five strategic priorities for healthcare marketing leaders ready to lead the shift.
1. Reallocate Resources Toward Contextual Engagement
The first step is to reassess how investment supports actual care experiences. Media budgets should prioritize channels where decisions are made and relationships already exist:
- In-person and digital placements where attention is already healthcare-focused, such as clinical settings and online health portals
- EHR and digital tools embedded within the provider workflow
- Environments where both HCPs and patients engage together, fostering shared understanding
Kim Maney emphasized the power of setting:
“When messaging happens within a healthcare setting, it anchors better. Patients remember it, they trust it, and it drives real conversations.”
These environments are as high-performance as they are high-credibility. Marketers should expect greater engagement, better recall, and stronger outcomes.
As brands recalibrate where their messages show up, they must also rethink how success is measured. Many have grown accustomed to the immediacy of digital ad metrics: exposure, clicks, conversions. Point of Care demands a different approach. In-care experiences unfold differently, and measurement frameworks must adapt accordingly.
2. Build Privacy and Compliance Into the Core Strategy
Trust cannot be retrofitted. It has to be built from the start. As privacy expectations shift, leadership isn’t just about compliance. It’s about building systems that earn and sustain good faith.
Kim Maney makes this expectation clear:
"Understand your data flows. Be able to explain them. Build trust first. That’s how you succeed."
Healthcare brands must:
- Audit all partners for compliance with state and federal privacy laws (CCPA, HIPAA, emerging state laws) or seek credible third-party certifications that can verify compliance.
- Establish proactive and transparent consent mechanisms wherever patient data is involved.
- Be able to transparently explain the value exchange to patients and providers.
Building trust at the system level allows messaging at the personal level to carry weight.
3. Shift Messaging from Broadcast to Support
Point of Care demands a different messaging approach. It’s not a space for brand slogans or blanket promotion. Instead, it’s a channel for education, dialogue, and support — designed to assist patients as they make decisions in partnership with their providers.
Marketers should focus on:
- Communicating clinical relevance and patient benefit clearly
- Prioritizing shared decision-making over persuasion
- Creating materials that inform, contextualize, and prompt conversation
As Tish Pahl reminded marketers:
"You have to be able to articulate how what you do advances patient health, not just brand goals. That’s how you defend—and grow—the category."
This is the difference between showing up in the workflow and showing up for the patient.
4. Train Teams on the New Narrative
Execution depends on alignment, and alignment depends on understanding. Brand, media, sales, and compliance teams need to move beyond treating ad placement as a tactical output. Your organization must fully grasp why placement matters, how context shapes outcomes, and what the Point of Care channel uniquely delivers.
When teams focus only on channel performance, they miss the broader strategic opportunity. Instead, they should be thinking responsively about patient behavior, the decision-making environment, and how to orchestrate placements that actually influence outcomes. Leadership has to demand we go deeper than rote measurements that often show frequency of engagement, but do not tell the whole story.
This means equipping teams with:
- Clear, repeatable language for actualizing the value of Point of Care, particularly its role across each stage of an engagement lifecycle and/or health journey
- Real-world scenarios, data, and case examples that illustrate how messaging performs in patient-provider settings
- Frameworks that connect Point of Care strategy to broader business outcomes, including cost efficiency, adherence, and brand trust
- Leadership confidence to introduce updated measurement standards and support teams in adapting without penalty as the strategy evolves
Jim Potter’s advice to marketers was direct and on point:
"If you’re going to influence legislators, or internal stakeholders, walk them through the patient’s experience. Make it real. Make it human."
That guidance starts with leadership. Most healthcare marketers are motivated to connect the right health solutions to the people who need them. Making that real, and making it work, depends on strengthening their understanding of patients and reinforcing strategies that center their experience. Strategic clarity begins internally.
5. Strengthen Advocacy and Industry Partnerships
Internal alignment is only part of the equation. Healthcare brands also need to show up externally. Not defensively, but with clarity and purpose. Point of Care marketing, when done responsibly, is effective marketing and supports the healthcare system by informing patients, reinforcing provider guidance, and improving outcomes.
Marketers have a role to play in ensuring that value is understood and protected. That means:
- Supporting organizations like the Coalition for Healthcare Communication and others working to preserve responsible communication in healthcare
- Engaging proactively with policymakers and advocacy groups to clarify the patient benefit of Point of Care strategies
- Monitoring emerging state legislation and contributing real-world insight before policies are set in motion
As Tish Pahl made clear:
"Retreating doesn't work. If you don't own what you do and explain its value, you will be overrun by misunderstanding and fear."
Owning the message and its impact is part of marketing leadership in today’s environment.
Safeguarding the Safe Spaces: POC for Legal and Compliance Resilience
As political rhetoric intensifies and legislative proposals proliferate, Point of Care marketing remains one of the most stable and strategically aligned channels in healthcare. Its natural safeguards, including physician oversight and integration within the healthcare system, directly address the concerns driving public and legislative skepticism around pharmaceutical influence in mass-market advertising. Investing in POC is not a retreat to safety. It is a forward-looking strategy aligned with frameworks built to endure and structured to reach audiences based on immediate health needs.
This strategic fit is reinforced by three core legal pillars that have consistently upheld the integrity and legitimacy of Point of Care marketing:
1. FDA Oversight: A Structured Regulatory Framework
Unlike broader consumer advertising, pharmaceutical marketing operates under clearly defined FDA standards. These require that:
- Promotional content is truthful and non-misleading
- Risks and benefits are presented in fair balance
- Indications and usage details are accurate and prominent
POC campaigns that are educational and clinically relevant naturally meet these expectations.
As Jim Potter noted:
"The FDA is the enforcement mechanism. Executive orders can make headlines, but actual enforcement requires agency action."
In practical terms, that means even if a sweeping ban were announced, implementation would require an FDA process, offering brands time to adapt and challenge if necessary.
2. First Amendment Protections for Commercial Speech
Commercial speech in healthcare is protected under the free-speech clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In a series of rulings, the Supreme Court developed in 1980 what is known as the Central Hudson Test, which upholds content that is:
- Not misleading
- Related to lawful activity
- Not suppressible unless the government proves a direct, substantial interest and no less restrictive alternative
Educational Point of Care communications, by its nature, meet these criteria.
As Potter emphasized:
"The burden of proof is on regulators to show that restricting communication would directly and materially advance a substantial interest—and that there’s no less restrictive means. That’s a high bar."
3. State-Level Constitutional Safeguards
Most state constitutions also uphold commercial speech protections. That means POC messaging centered on education and decision-making remains viable across jurisdictions.
Potter reassured attendees:
"The same legal work we would do federally applies at the state level. The constitutional protections are there, too."
4. Why Legal Structure Matters for Strategy
In today’s regulatory environment, healthcare marketers need more than adaptable messaging. They need strategic footing. Point of Care marketing is effective not because it escapes scrutiny, but because it reflects the standards that protect patients and guide responsible communication.
Point of Care marketing remains resilient because it is fundamentally aligned with how healthcare decisions are made. It:
- Prioritizes informed patient engagement
- Reinforces provider-led guidance
- Delivers timely, clinically relevant information
- Operates with transparency and respect for context
When foundational practices like these are embedded in Point of Care content, they are not legal workarounds. They reflect what both regulators and patients expect from responsible healthcare communication.
5. How to Safeguard POC Investments
To maintain integrity and resilience in Point of Care strategies, marketers should:
- Ensure all materials undergo rigorous medical, legal, and privacy review
- Document how messaging enhances provider-led decision-making rather than attempting to replace it
- Stay current on FDA guidance and evolving compliance standards
- Proactively engage in advocacy that reinforces the value of Point of Care to patients and the healthcare system
Brands that adopt these principles early will avoid unnecessary risk and lead from a position of credibility, trust, and long-term relevance.
Looking Ahead: Future-Proofing with POC at the Core
The healthcare marketing ecosystem is under pressure, but that pressure may signal a lasting transformation. It reflects deeper shifts in consumer behavior, growing privacy expectations, and intensified regulatory scrutiny. For brands that view these changes as climate, not weather, the emerging conditions demand a rethinking of how we build trust and how we support patients, providers, and communities. Point of Care is not a stopgap. It is a strategic compass guiding a more credible and sustainable approach.
Legacy models prioritized reach. But scale without context no longer delivers results. It also plays into a growing public skepticism around pharmaceutical advertising. Today’s marketing strategies must prioritize relevance, proximity to care, and credibility. Success depends on meeting patient expectations and arriving in spaces where people are not only receptive, but actively seeking health guidance. Point of Care channels deliver at these moments, where patients are most focused, most informed, and most ready to act.
As expectations rise, so does the imperative for brands to meet them meaningfully. Patients want information that supports understanding, not just awareness. They expect communication that aligns with their care journey, and support that flows across digital, physical, and provider-driven touchpoints. Point of Care creates the space for that. As Tish Pal noted, it enables shared vocabulary and aligned understanding between patients and providers. That is not ancillary. It is essential.
Strategic leaders are already looking ahead. The question is no longer what works today, but what will still work five years from now. Point of Care will remain a resilient, durable foundation across use cases. It adapts to evolving patient needs, supports diverse therapeutic areas, and integrates directly into care delivery.
As Jim Potter reminded attendees:
“What legislators want to hear is how your messaging helps patients and doesn’t interfere with medical decisions. That’s what POC is built for.”
This is not just sound marketing. It is structural integrity. And in the cycles ahead, structure will separate those who pivot reactively from those who lead with purpose.
