The 2025 Pharma FWD Summit Series: The Innovative Marketer brought together industry leaders, marketing innovators, and commercial strategists to explore the evolving landscape of pharmaceutical marketing.
As a team at CTC, we were excited to sponsor, attend and engage with the discussions on the latest strategies, patient-centric marketing, and the growing role of AI in shaping the future of healthcare engagement.
Across ten insightful sessions, we gained valuable insights that are directly relevant to the work we do for our clients and the challenges we navigate daily.
For those who couldn’t attend—or for those who want a refresher—here are our key takeaways and what we are walking away with from the summit.
Key Takeaways
- The Canadian Healthcare system needs innovation.
- Innovation doesn’t have to be radical—it can be a small shift, pivot or iteration on a previous idea. Think big, start small, ramp up quickly.
- Innovation is drawn from three main themes:
- Insights: What are the unmet needs? What problem needs solving? The skill of the marketer is to distill out the most relevant problems and remove the noise
- Purpose: Aim for a higher purpose than just scripts. Never miss the opportunity to heighten the sense of noble purpose.
- Performance: Start with the end in mind. What does good like? How will you measure it?
- AI allows us the mental space to be creative and push for real innovation.
- AI is a powerful tool, but human connection and the ability to build a relationship remain irreplaceable.
- Create your own AI “minions”, and use AI to develop the prompts that will create these minions. Act like Gru—assemble your minions together, give them personas, orchestrate them, work tasks between them, and most importantly, squint at the content they give you with critical thought.
- It’s predicted by 2040, there will be a shift to health promotion and health restoration, just as much as treating illness. With this, new players will emerge in the healthcare system, expanding the definition of key customers.
- Rethink historical approaches to brand strategy. Think “above brand”. Consider the impact of collaboration in moving through roadblocks in process. We need to get the right medicine to right patient faster, and we all need to align on this big objective.
- Fast, real-time insight generation is critical. Continuously assess the impact and ROI of tactics. Stay agile and responsive to the evolving market. Static brand plans are a thing of the past.
A big thank you to Matrix Healthcare and all the fantastic speakers and panelists for sharing their insights and driving important conversations about the future of pharma marketing! See you next year!
Check out the full program on PharmaFwd's website!
