2025 Categories & Scoring

Brought to you by: Ostro

For the smartest use of smart tech. This award honors campaigns that tapped into AI to personalize, predict, automate, or otherwise supercharge pharma marketing results.

Doing good, brilliantly. This award spotlights marketing efforts that made a real difference—whether through donations, awareness, or support programs that put purpose front and center.

Proof that influence works. This category celebrates campaigns that teamed up with healthcare pros, patients, or creators to build trust, spark conversations, and drive action—authentically and effectively.

The standout star. This is for the trailblazer who led with vision, pushed boundaries, and delivered big. Innovation, impact, and leadership—this marketer brought it all.

Scoring Criteria:

Creativity – Is the marketer using innovative ideas that go beyond traditional pharmaceutical advertising?

Strategy – Is the marketer thinking strategically about their marketing initiatives? Do they have a cohesive plan driving their work forward?

Innovation – How unique are the marketer's tactics? Are they going beyond the status quo to stand out from their peers? Do they fit the definition of ”game changing?”

Behind every great campaign, is a great agency. We are looking for the industry leaders, the movers and shakers, the teams pushing marketing to the next level. This category honors the agencies that have shown exceptional innovation, talent, and creativity across their entire portfolio.

Scoring Criteria:

Creativity – Is the agency using innovative ideas that go beyond traditional pharmaceutical advertising?

Strategy – What’s the strategic focus of the agency? Do they have a cohesive plan driving the team and company forward?

Social Good – Does the agency have initiatives that address any larger social health issues?

Innovation – How unique are the agency’s tactics? Are they going beyond the status quo to stand out from their peers? Do they fit the definition of ”game changing?”

Banners and display ads are the old guard of online marketing, but effective and targeted pharma campaigns spur interest and drive traffic to more information. This category is for those non-social media internet campaigns that exemplify the best of web marketing.

This award category is judged exclusively by physicians. HCP engagement is constantly evolving but the goal of delivering high-value content to physicians remains the same. This category highlights creative marketing initiatives that result in meaningful HCP impact, judged by the physicians themselves.

Please use code: IMPIRICUSHCP

Pharma and healthcare companies are tapping the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans in challenges that look for the best ideas around health conditions from diabetes to cancer. This award will recognize the most creative and effective contests run over the past year.

While medical conferences may have hit a pause during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the enduring fixtures at those events is the advertising from airport terminals and taxi cabs to hotels and convention arenas. This award will recognize the most compelling conference campaigns over the past year.

Some health conditions and diseases disproportionately affect people of various racial or ethnic backgrounds. This category honours the health campaigns that effectively and creatively reach specific minority audiences.

Even groundbreaking products need marketing. After all, how will patients and professionals get to know and use a new drug or treatment without use-case scenarios and benefit-and-risk lists? This category seeks the best strategies and most creative marketing—and their ensuing sales outcomes —for products launched in the last year.

The mainstream TV audience is not always appropriate, or in the budget, for rare conditions or targeted treatments. Online videos and even films can be specifically tailored to smaller, more appropriate audiences. The online video or film category recognizes the creativity and budget efficiency in those projects.

Television is a proven category for building both product and disease awareness. This category recognizes the most creative and effective TV advertising that goes beyond the tried and traditional to create conversations by educating and informing TV viewers.

As consumers and physicians move from reading to watching and now listening, the key for pharma marketers is to translate visual marketing strengths into relevant and unique content for audio. This category showcases the most creative and unique audio and podcasting campaigns.

Strong relationships with healthcare professionals are essential to pharma marketing strategies. Companies build those connections with interactions across a wide variety of media channels. This category honors the exceptional social media, digital and print campaigns used to reach and inform doctors, nurses, hospital workers and others.

Media pitches, healthcare KOL outreach and even cross-country media tours can help pharma companies generate buzz for new products or awareness efforts. These unpaid placements can make the difference in gaining widespread attention. This category recognizes the creative and effective pitches that get pharma products and companies noticed.

While Twitter and Instagram might not be the easiest places for pharma to navigate, many companies are tweeting and ’gramming, including with influencer partners, for noteworthy campaigns. This category highlights the standout marketing efforts that defy social media character counts and space constraints.

Today, most TV, print and digital ads come with links to websites for more information. The all-important landing pages where those links lead can be print-heavy and boring, or dynamic and informative. This category will award the latter, recognizing the best-designed and most user-friendly websites for consumers.