Healthcare Marketers Trend Report 2026: Digital ad spend overtakes linear TV

Not long ago,the following sentence would have sounded like a consultant’s fever dream: In 2026, digital advertising spend in the pharmaceutical sector will, for the first time, officially exceed linear TV spend. It’s a milestone that’s been forecast, debated and used to justify a thousand strategic pivots.

Sandy Weag, EVP of engagement strategy and communications planning at CMI Media Group, has watched this transformation up close and is unambiguous about what it means for how agencies operate. “Gone are the days when we’re going to lock in spend in a way that’s inflexible,” Weag says. “We’re expected to be optimizing almost on the fly.”

That’s not a small cultural shift. It means the old model — develop strategy, allocate budget, execute, measure six months later, repeat — is functionally obsolete. The campaign that isn’t being actively managed in near real time is, at this point, a campaign that’s underperforming.

You can read the full article here.