Celebrating comms excellence

What does SAY’s healthcare communications crystal ball reveal for the coming year? We’ve looked at what we can expect to see more of in 2025 and what we will leave behind.

Straightforward, accurate content
Healthcare by headlines can be misleading and we may have reached peak simplification. Can we simplify further without dumbing down and losing credibility? Over the coming year our challenge will be continuing to provide the bite-sized content everyone craves while maintaining scientific rigour.

Authentic content through AI
We couldn’t consider the future for healthcare comms without touching on artificial intelligence (AI). We all hope AI will take on our more time-consuming comms tasks, leaving us with additional strategic thinking time and extra space for creativity. This year we expect AI to help us to do more with less, helping us create personalised and targeted content to cut through the noise, but with the proviso that it needs to be checked carefully by a human to ensure authenticity and accuracy. AI still isn’t terribly smart, and there’s a danger that AI-created content will misinform. Can we even trust it without training AI further?

Aligning with the issues of the day
Talking of trust, we’d like to see the pharma industry leverage its scientific evidence base to combat misinformation from healthcare influencers and others in 2025. However, it’s no longer sufficient to talk only about the medicines they develop; companies are involved in the big issues of the day, including sustainability, inclusivity and gender equality and as such they need to shape a coherent narrative that encompasses these new layers.

The ascent of PR
Finally, we expect to see increasing recognition of PR’s value as part of the marketing mix. Rising advertising costs and the anticipated loss of cookies means paid digital marketing is losing its appeal, and audiences are increasingly seeing the merit of authentic third-party content. Earned media delivered by a PR campaign is a cost-effective way to communicate in 2025.

Lorraine Walters is Practice Leader, Pharma and Med Tech and Melissa Kerschen is Account Director, both at SAY Communications