Healthcare’s ad-tech imperative

On May 14, Microsoft dropped a bomb, the aftershocks of which continue to roil pharma media.

The company announced that it would shutter Microsoft Invest, the demand-side platform (DSP) more commonly known by its previous name Xandr, by February 28, 2026. This meant that any number of organizations, in healthcare and in other verticals, would need to reassess the technology they use to programmatically buy digital ad space.

The announcement may have surprised many observers, but it shouldn’t have. In a March blog post about its ongoing investment in conversational agents, Microsoft teased a future “where websites can talk and ads become highly personalized and naturally integrated into conversational experiences.” While the notion that Xandr could be seamlessly replaced by a “chatbot-style product” that runs on Microsoft’s GenAI platform was met with widespread skepticism, that response ducked a larger issue that pharma and healthcare companies have been avoiding for some time: the pressing need for ad-tech that caters to the very specific needs of their industry.

To understand why these organizations find themselves scrambling for solutions, it’s worth taking a step back to look under the proverbial hood. DSPs are digital marketplaces that facilitate the buying of ad inventory from myriad publishers. They represent the demand-side counterpoint to supply-side platforms (SSPs), which help those same publishers sell their existing inventory to advertisers. DSPs encompass a range of essential functions, from managing automated bids for space and defining audience criteria to controlling ad frequency and tracking campaign performance.

Media and marketing teams in pharma and healthcare rely on DSPs for more than that, however. DSPs serve as their overarching performance-optimization engines, managing compliance and maintaining the sanctity of data. In short, DSPs are the backbone of many companies’ programmatic operations

Healthcare programmatic demands DSPs that understand our unique space and the precision and compliance required,” notes CMI Media Group SVP, digital activation, Clifton Covey. “Our ability to drive meaningful results hinges on DSPs that are purpose-built for this industry — platforms that inherently understand the nuances of health data, ensure brand safety with impeccable inventory quality and are architected from the ground up to manage the intricate web of regulatory and privacy requirements.

“This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about efficacy and trust,” he adds.

This means the obvious question of “What’s next?” is one that must be answered sooner than later. Should they choose to migrate their programmatic buying to a different industry-agnostic DSP, there are plenty of options. None of these platforms, however, were tailored to accommodate pharma’s regulatory and compliance needs, nor are they flexible enough to address those needs in a bespoke manner. That’s why plug-and-play solutions represent a quick fix that delays an eventual — and inevitable—move to health-specific ad-tech.

Health-specific DSPs have numerous bars to clear. To begin with, they need to vet all inventory to ensure that pharma ads are only placed adjacent to health-safe and credible content — which is not the easiest task in the current era of health misinformation. They must align their privacy controls with requirements imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the increasing number of state laws that address consumer privacy. Doceree’s platform takes it a step further, including EHR-specific integrations and targeting capabilities.

The DSPs also have to integrate fluidly with claims and prescription data, as well as data siloed within electronic medical records (addressing yet another interoperability challenge around EMRs will likely prompt in-house technologists to sigh wearily). Finally, they must include a robust reporting dashboard to help organizations track brand lift, engagement and any other number of metrics.

This is not, in short, an exercise for the meek. The transition away from Xandr will require significant resources, both in terms of money and time. Its success will hinge upon a set of skills that aren’t necessarily present in every organization; even the biggest and most technologically attuned pharma companies may not have the capabilities and appetite to build something of this complicated nature from scratch.

They don’t necessarily have to, given that a handful of health-specific DSPs already exist. These platforms encompass all the functions previously managed by Xandr, but with the bolstered privacy and compliance safeguards pharma brand team leaders have come to realize are a must-have, rather than a nice-to-have. While a more highly functional health ad-tech ecosystem isn’t going to emerge overnight, the pieces are already in place for the industry to usher in a new era of programmatic media.

Those aforementioned leaders will play a huge role in shaping it. Ad-tech has traditionally been a behind-the-scenes concern at healthcare companies, one that falls under the domain of IT rather than marketing. For health-specific, purpose-built DSPs to become the rule and not the exception, this needs to change. The importance of the functions automated by DSPs is too high to be entrusted to anyone but marketing-side leaders 

Indeed, a few years from now the healthcare marketing community might look back on the announcement of Xandr’s imminent demise as a true fork-in-the-road moment. They might frame it as the instant it became clear that licensing a DSP from a general-market provider narrowed their options and limited their flexibility — and, by extension, the growth of their brands.

With the February 2026 Xandr shutdown looming, the time to embrace health-specific ad-tech is now. Companies that fail to heed the numerous warning signals risk not just falling behind the competition, but also minimizing the impact of the brands they want to promote (not to mention the patients they hope to treat). They’ve been presented with an opportunity to evolve and innovate; it is essential for the health of the industry’s programmatic infrastructure that they claim it.