BranchLab, an ad-tech start up with a prescription to help pharmaceutical marketers meet increasingly restrictive privacy regulations, said it named Errol Taylor to its board of advisors.
Taylor is the former head of the BioPharma Practice at Milbank who understands the evolving landscape of healthcare advertising.
Taylor is coming on board as 10 states have passed regulations making it harder to use patient information to target advertising.
“This is moving through state legislatures. We don’t think it’s going to stop and it’s impacting pharmaceutical companies’ ability to reach their customers, their patients,” Taylor told Broadcasting+Cable.
Taylor said he thinks BranchLab’s ID-less approach to targeting ads is an effective answer to the problem.
“I think not only will it provide value to the pharmaceutical companies, but also to the patients,” he said.
Michael Parkes, who was president of measurement company VideoAmp before becoming co-founder, president and chief revenue officer of BranchLab, said the company’s ID-less solution builds on anonymized health data.
“We build predictive audience models from that data that statistically represent the patient population and then apply that to publisher data to find high-indexing inventory,” Parkes said.
“We're also working directly with the publisher first-party data, so we're able to get around the deprecation of third-party IDs as well, which is another trend that's impacting the health audience space,” he said.
Additionally, BranchLab uses cleanroom technology to maintain strict privacy controls.
The result is an approach that maintains compliance with federal, state and industry regulations, Parkes said.
“You still have to drive media performance,” he said. “So we're able to do both.”
Parkes said BrandLab's approach is already being used in the market and that the company has relationships with a number of media companies, as well as some marketers.
PROGRAMMATIC PARTNERS
BranchLab also has partnerships with OpenX and Magnite to integrate its data into those programmatic platforms.
So far, he said, campaigns using the BranchLab approach have produced results at least as good as the legacy ID-based targeting methods.
“I think you can get strong media performance with the tools that we have, Parkes said. “So it’s really rethinking the entire end-to-end process and we’ve come up with a different way of doing it.”
BranchLab’s is pitching its solution to media companies, media buyers and brands, which are ultimately the ones paying to target campaigns.
“We have been working across the board to make sure that there's transparency, there's confidence and trust in the methodology so people can feel good that this is a solution that not only addresses the needs from a privacy and compliance standpoint but also future proofs for what could be coming in the future,” he said.
BranchLab solution’s financial arrangement is similar to other data fees.
“Advertisers are used to paying for audience targeting and they don't want it to go away. They just need a solution,” he said.
While BranchLab’s approach is ID-less, Parkes said that publishers that have created first-party identity systems will have an advantage as third-party identifiers become less reliable.
BranchLab was started in February by CEO Josh Walsh, co-founder of AdTheorent; Parkes and Chief Technology Officer Chris Cagle, former executive VP, technology, AdTheorent
The company is backed by a seed round of funding led by Newark Venture Partners. Venture capital firm Aperiam also was part of the seed round of funding
Healthcare generated ad spending of about $23.5 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach almost $34 billion by 2032, according to IMARC Group, BranchLab said.
That’s a big market, but ultimately, BranchLab’s approach could be used in other industries.
“The base technology could be a platform for something much more than just in the pharma space, absolutely,” said Taylor.
But Parkes said that for now, the company is focused on drugs.
“I think how the privacy landscape plays out in the next couple of years may change that, but for now we're only focused on pharma, he said.
“Our belief is that this is it sets a precedent for more states to follow but I think everyone on the the advertiser and the publisher side are already thinking about about how to future-proof this their setup,” Parkes said.
