What happened: A controlled test across specialty pharma campaigns found that supply-side platform OpenX’s OpenXSelect delivered 32% more reach among verified healthcare providers than uploading the same deterministic HCP audience directly to a DSP, on identical budgets. The study, run by healthcare marketing platform Wrango and OpenX, also found a 22% lower cost per unique HCP reached through OpenXSelect’s open targeting path.
Why it matters: The result challenges a default assumption in healthcare programmatic: that once an audience is built and onboarded, reach is basically fixed. “For years, the assumption in HCP programmatic has been that audience onboarding alone determines campaign reach. Our test shows that’s not where reach is decided,” said Josh Alvernia, CEO and co-founder of Wrango. Instead, the study attributes the reach gap to identity resolution happening at the supply side, closer to the bid request, rather than to differences in available inventory.
The original insight: The finding matters beyond pharma because it reframes a persistent programmatic complaint, that campaigns underdeliver against a known audience, as a placement-of-work problem rather than an inventory problem. “OpenXSelect is built to do identity resolution work at scale, across signals, so brands in regulated categories like pharma can activate the audiences they’ve already built without that signal degrading along the way,” said Joseph Worswick, SVP, Global Partnerships at OpenX. Regulated categories were the proving ground here precisely because privacy constraints make identity loss most visible, but the same signal-degradation problem exists anywhere a brand hands off an audience from a DSP to open inventory, which is why supply-side identity work is becoming as central to ad decisioning’s move to the supply side as curation itself, and why healthcare-specific supply, like DeepIntent’s recent DOOH expansion, keeps getting built around the same identity constraints.
Source: OpenX
