A dose of private equity is apparently just what the doctor ordered.
On Tuesday, UK-based PE firm Vitruvian Partners made a $637 million strategic investment in DeepIntent, a health care-focused demand-side platform that specializes in helping pharma brands reach patients and providers using programmatic advertising.
Although Vitruvian’s portfolio includes a bunch of software, consumer tech and data services companies – it’s put money into data analytics platform Alteryx, live video shopping platform Bambuser and Just Eat (the UK’s answer to DoorDash), to name a few – DeepIntent is Vitruvian’s first foray into ad tech.
But DeepIntent isn’t Vitruvian’s first bet on health care. It has a wide range of holdings across the health and life sciences sectors, including companies in clinical research, home care and dental monitoring.
“They’ve been focused on health care for quite some time,” said Chris Paquette, DeepIntent’s CEO and founder. “Now they’re starting to really expand their presence in the US.”
Numerous US states, meanwhile, are really starting to tighten their privacy laws, many of which contain provisions that cover sensitive information, including health data.
“We’ve built core competencies and a lot of tech to safely transcribe insights from health data sets that can be used to activate programmatic campaigns,” Paquette said. “So, I think [those laws] are actually a tailwind for us.”
Since 2017, and prior to Vitruvian’s majority stake, DeepIntent, which has around 380 employees, was owned by holding company Propel Media. Early last year, the FTC, still under then-chair Lina Khan, blocked Propel’s planned merger with clinical software company IQVIA over concerns about reducing competition in the programmatic advertising market for health care products.
Paquette spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Why go the PE route? Private equity has a reputation for being rather ruthless and for prioritizing short-term gains over long-term sustainability.
CHRIS PAQUETTE: Yes, they’re private equity, but they’re different. They work more on the growth investment side.
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We’d sold the company early on to Propel Media [roughly a year after DeepIntent was founded in 2016], and we’ve grown primarily organically for the past seven or eight years. But we realized that if we took on some investment, we could ramp up the product, do more hiring, potentially do M&A and also accelerate our road map against the opportunity we see ahead.
What’s the opportunity you see ahead?
We have a vision in mind for how we think AI is going to improve the way marketers and agencies use our platform.
We’re a health care DSP, and for a very long time we’ve been out there talking about how we believe that verticalized DSPs are the way of the future. But we often see buyers going with whatever technology that’s in front of them, like the large incumbent DSPs that service many different verticals.
This investment validates what we’ve been saying for awhile, which is that given the need for compliance and the particulars of running a health campaign, this category deserves its own technology solutions.
Other than how sensitive the data is, what makes health care advertising trickier than “regular” ad tech?
We’re not usually marketing to people who can go directly to the store and buy the drugs they’re seeing. They have to make sure they have coverage from their insurance company first, because it’s their insurance company that usually pays.
Also, our advertisers have to raise awareness among at least three different parties: providers, patients and payers.
Can you give me a real-world example of how this works in practice?
In our platform, we have deidentified health data sets that we combine with demographic data to find trends in specific patient populations, including based on socioeconomic status and location.
We use these insights – not the data itself, just the insights – to deliver and optimize the ads we show to those populations.
For example, around 80% of migraine sufferers are women, so our platform will deliver more ads on woman-oriented publishers. That’s just one dimension of thousands we can look at to more efficiently reach audiences.
How will generative AI come into it?
We have a solid foundation of planning tools. There’s our DSP itself, and we have measurement and optimization capabilities. But a lot of our clients interact with those tools in a siloed way. One team is using the DSP, another is doing the optimization, et cetera.
There’s an opportunity to bring those parts together with some form of agentic AI.
We can also help fill knowledge gaps between people who come from the ad tech world and people coming from the health care world. For example, you might have a planner who’s marketing an oncology therapeutic, but they don’t realize that certain types of genetic testing could be of interest to this patient population.
I think generative AI can help media teams and agencies round out their understanding and enhance the information that’s going out to patients and providers, and do it in a low-risk way.
Are pharma advertisers worried about the current administration? Weird time to be alive, although when isn’t it.
And the intensity of the weirdness just keeps increasing.
But look, I’d say there’s a healthy amount of optimism, specifically for the advertising space. There are so many trends that support what we do and why we do it. People are increasingly moving to digital health care providers and they want more scientific information before they make decisions. Providers are adapting to this behavior.
At the end of the day, pharma ads play an important role in raising awareness and encouraging proactive health behaviors, and there’s also a clear need for communication in “health deserts,” meaning places where there are no close pharmacies or clinics.
Health advertising is one of the first lines of communication to raise awareness about conditions.
Answers have been lightly edited and condensed.
