When a channel gets regulated, the money does not disappear. It moves. And it has been moving a while now: pharma investment in out of home advertising rose more than sixfold between 2016 and 2024, according to OAAA figures shared with Fierce Pharma. The FDA is rewriting the rules on broadcast drug ads and has told drug sponsors that deceptive advertising has become the norm on social platforms. Billboards, meanwhile, are being sold to healthcare marketers as stable, trusted and brand safe.
Chris Boyer and Reed Smith spend this episode on the question hiding inside that pitch. Is out of home actually safe, or is it just unexamined? Those are not the same thing, and only one of them lasts.
What most marketing teams have not caught up to is what happened to the channel itself while nobody was watching it. A billboard can now be selected based on the health profile of the few blocks around it, using disease prevalence data mapped to inventory at a precision that would trigger a privacy review in any other channel your team buys. Reed calls it a data story wearing a billboard costume. Once you hear it that way, the brand safe framing starts to sound less like a description and more like a countdown.
Then the conversation goes back to 1971, when cigarette ads were pushed off television and radio. The tobacco industry did not cut its budget. It relocated, immediately and measurably, into magazines and event sponsorship. Regulation eventually followed the money into those channels too, but the gap between the money arriving and the rules arriving was long enough to build an entire era of marketing on top of. Chris and Reed work out how long that gap might run this time. They do not land in the same place.
The last stretch is for health system marketers specifically, who carry none of pharma’s drug claims exposure and every temptation to copy pharma’s response anyway. Chris and Reed close on concrete actions worth taking this quarter, starting with a question almost nobody has asked their media buyer, and a category of community partnership that does not look like advertising at all until you check what sits behind it.
If your out of home campaigns skip the review your search and social campaigns already get, ask whether that is a judgment about the data or only about the format.
Mentions from the Show:
- Healthcare’s Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook marking 500 episodes: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com
- Fierce Pharma, 2026 forecast on pharma ad dollars shifting away from traditional TV, citing OAAA data on the sixfold rise in pharma OOH investment 2016 to 2024. OAAA is the OOH industry trade association: https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/2026-forecast-pharma-ad-dollars-will-continue-shifting-away-traditional-tv
- FDA, Launches Crackdown on Deceptive Drug Advertising, September 9 2025: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-launches-crackdown-deceptive-drug-advertising
- OptimizeRx and Lamar Advertising partnership announcement, ZIP+4 mapping against Micro-Neighborhood Targeting disease prevalence data, September 9 2025. Vendor announcement, labeled as such: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/09/09/3147336/0/en/OptimizeRx-Partners-with-Lamar-Advertising-to-Reach-Clinically-Relevant-Audiences-Through-Out-of-Home-Healthcare-Advertising.html
- Warner KE, Goldenhar LM, The cigarette advertising broadcast ban and magazine coverage of smoking and health, Journal of Public Health Policy, 1989: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2715337/
- Trends in Cigarette Marketing Expenditures 1975 to 2019, analysis of FTC Cigarette Reports, covering the post-1971 shift into unrestricted channels and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement billboard and transit prohibition: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9048889/
- World Out of Home Organization, Global Out of Home Expenditure Report 2026: https://www.worldooh.org/news/woo-global-ooh-expenditure-report-2026
- OAAA, Out of Home Advertising Revenue Reaches Record $9.46 Billion, March 2026. Industry trade association: https://oaaa.org/news/out-of-home-advertising-revenue-reaches-record-9-46-billion/
- Edelman Trust Barometer: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer
- TP472, “Reputation as a Signal, Not a Score,” on declining institutional trust in healthcare
- TP429, “Are We Wasting Our Digital Media Spend?” on where healthcare media dollars actually go
- Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/
- Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/
- Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/
- Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social
- Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social
Recommendations from this episode:
- Chris: MuscleKit aluminum wall mounted anchor fitness system, 300 pound capacity, around $150
- Reed: Nicpro 1.3mm mechanical pencil set, three pencils with black, red and yellow lead
