Last year, the digital ad buying platform DeepIntent sold a majority stake to private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, and vowed to use the $637 million in capital it received to integrate generative AI tools into its stack.
The company just realized that vision, with the launch of Cora, an AI platform with multiple agents designed to let healthcare marketers execute tasks with conversational language. DeepIntent, which specializes in helping pharma brands like Bayer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson buy online ads, is positioning Cora as a fully-agentic marketing platform for the healthcare industry.
Cora’s various agents are built to handle various stages of campaign planning, from analyzing data to developing audience strategies across channels, including linear TV thanks to a VideoAmp integration. It also can power execution of the media plan.
In beta testing, the platform cut marketing planning time cycles by 50%, with over 95% of clients reporting dramatically faster workflows, DeepIntent founder and CEO Chris Paquette told ADWEEK.
Paquette is betting that healthcare clients will need these capabilities as they release more specialized drugs designed for more narrowly-defined patient populations, which requires more complex and precise ad targeting.
More than 100 medications are in stage 1 and 2 of FDA clinical trials, and many of them are designed to target conditions that affect fewer than 10,000 people worldwide. In the decade to come, some of these new drugs will get approved, Paquette said, and marketers will need to be more efficient in order to make small-population drugs financially viable.
“We need to radically rethink the way that drugs are brought to market and commercialized—that’s where Cora comes in,” Paquette said.
In a statement, Dave Leitner, evp and head of media at DeepIntent media partner Eversana Intouch, added: “We’ve found DeepIntent’s Cora platform extremely beneficial in helping provide data- and AI-driven views that enable us to make smarter media investment decisions from day one.”
DeepIntent also plans to power Cora with new data, including signals related to payers and drug coverage. This data is available through Helix, an application that lets marketers grab aggregated healthcare data in a way designed to protect patient privacy.
Like many adtech companies with AI-powered tools, the data fueling those tools is the most valuable asset.
“In the process of building this data-driven advertising machine, we actually built through partnerships one of the most comprehensive data sets that is representative of what’s happening in the healthcare market at any given time,” Paquette said.