In part one of our series on why pharma marketers should be revisiting the role of out-of-home media, we explored the potential impact of any changes to the broader DTC advertising landscape. In part two, we’re exploring how targeting advancements stemming from the integration of data with OOH/DOOH inventory are driving more cost-efficient, precise reach.
The big news: media buyers no longer need to give up transparency and precision when including OOH/DOOH in their media plans, even when you’re not buying programmatically. Recently, our partner, Lamar Advertising, announced “Health Connect,” a healthcare-focused audience marketplace. It’s built to make out of home media perform like a data-driven digital channel, but with the privacy, credibility, and physical visibility that pharma marketers need right now.
As one of its core targeting capabilities, Health Connect links real-world Lamar inventory with OptimizeRx’s Micro-Neighborhood® Targeting (MNT) datasets, giving life-sciences brands the ability to align OOH/DOOH placements with true health-population dynamics. It’s not just about demographics or generalized consumer segments. It’s about prevalence, the actual distribution of conditions, therapeutic categories, or brand-specific patient profiles and treatment needs at a hyper-geographic level.
In other words: Health Connect with MNT translates clinical and population health data into media strategy.
The result is an environment where every billboard, transit screen, or digital panel can be mapped directly to neighborhoods with verified patient-density patterns, condition clusters, or provider-access corridors — all done compliantly, without using any personally identifiable information.
That’s what makes it different: it’s highly precise, low-risk data.
By combining Lamar’s physical network (the largest in the U.S.) with MNT’s deterministic disease-prevalence mapping, pharma marketers can:
This means you’re not guessing where your patients are — you’re reaching them where the data says they are most concentrated, and doing so in a compliant, channel-agnostic way.
MNT is the precision layer that makes population-specific placements possible for life science brands. It maps clinical and prescription-level dynamics (de-identified and aggregated) to real-world population clusters, driven by each life science brand’s explicit patient segments, at the neighborhood level, often down to just a few square blocks (depending on population density).
Unlike generalized “health index” data or ZIP-code targeting, MNT incorporates prevalence, prescribing patterns, and population health signals that correlate directly with brand-centric patient opportunity. That makes it the most clinically precise targeting approach available at scale in this channel.
Why?
In short, MNT gives pharma marketers the confidence that every impression is being served where it’s most likely to matter clinically — not just demographically.
"The result is an environment where every billboard, transit screen, or digital panel can be mapped directly to neighborhoods with verified patient-density patterns, condition clusters, or provider-access corridors — all done compliantly, without using any personally identifiable information"
Maria Cipicchio
SVP, Strategic Market Intelligence
Industry-standard reporting typically focuses on high-level metrics: traffic counts at the location, gross impressions (i.e., estimated “opportunity to see”), reach/frequency and sometimes, foot-traffic or web lift studies.
However, when working in a data-driven environment, you can expect more. Data-driven environments offer the same accountability from OOH/DOOH as you’re used to receiving on digital channels. With Lamar and MNT for example, you go deeper: you don’t just buy “25,000 impressions at this digital board” — you buy against a disease-weighted audience in a hyper-local geography, then measure not just mechanics (plays/impressions) but core questions: “Did we reach the right sub-population here? Did exposure in that neighborhood correlate with uplift in site visits, search behavior or script volume?”
Exposure is gathered through verified impression data, filtered through condition-specific prevalence maps to show true disease-weighted reach. Third-party measurement partners validate that the campaign actually reached the intended populations, while post-flight analysis links exposure zones to measurable changes in web activity, search behavior, or prescription trends. The result: clear, compliant evidence that MNT-driven OOH/DOOH isn’t just more precise — it’s provably effective.
While standard OOH/DOOH gives you visibility and scale, the data-driven method gives you precision and accountability. It transforms OOH from “we delivered placements” to “we exposed and educated patients and their healthcare providers.” That shift is especially valuable in the pharma media mix where the customer journey – the patient journey – is more complex, and hard to pinpoint in the real world.
In today’s volatile media environment, data-driven OOH/DOOH is an effective bridge between where people live their daily lives and how healthcare brands reach them responsibly.
In a DTC landscape where broadcast creative reviews are slowing launches and digital regulation is tightening, Lamar’s Health Connect, coupled with the brand-specific data MNT offers, provides an immediate, compliant, and scalable channel for awareness, education, and engagement, rooted in the most granular health-population data available.
Micro-Neighborhood® Targeting is what makes that precision real. It moves pharma media planning from “we think this market has patients” to “we know this corridor over-indexes for prevalence and treatment initiation — and we can reach it tomorrow.”
That’s the level of precision and agility healthcare marketers need as we head into 2026. Ready to see the impact for your brand? Connect with our team today!