See how Zero-Party Ads and VoiceAlike® AI helped one pharma brand achieve 3.2x higher engaged site reach and 2.2x higher audience quality than other programmatic partners.

Rare disease marketing presents a unique challenge for healthcare and pharmaceutical marketers. Patients are often difficult to identify, symptoms may go unrecognized for years, and the information someone needs varies dramatically depending on where they are in their healthcare journey.

One pharmaceutical brand set out to solve this challenge by creating a campaign that sought to better understand the diagnosed and undiagnosed patients they were reaching with their ads.

Using zero-party data and VoiceAlike® AI, the campaign:

• identified where people were in their medical journey
• delivered education tailored to their needs 
• optimized future ads based on this information, significantly outperforming other programmatic partners

The Challenge

The brand’s goal was to reach people affected by a rare, often underdiagnosed disease and guide them to educational resources most relevant to their situation.

Success would be measured using two key metrics:

• Crossix Audience Quality Score to indicate whether the ads were reaching the right patients
• Engaged Site Reach (ESR) to help the brand understand whether people who clicked on the ads were spending meaningful time engaging with its educational content

To make that content more relevant to the patients they reached, the team wanted to answer one important question first: What does this person need to know right now?

Rather than showing every potential patient the same message, the goal was to use that understanding to connect people with information that was more likely to be useful and relevant based on where they were in their medical journey.

The Strategy

The campaign began with a short, voluntary branded survey that qualified consumers into one of three groups:

• Experiencing symptoms but not yet diagnosed
• Recently diagnosed or exploring treatment options
• Currently receiving treatment

VoiceAlike® AI scaled these audiences by predicting responses for patients exposed to the ad campaign, allowing the brand to reach more people with messaging aligned with their needs:

• People experiencing symptoms received educational content about the disease and encouragement to speak with a healthcare provider.
• Patients exploring treatment options saw messaging that introduced therapies worth discussing with their care team.
• Patients already in treatment received branded messaging focused on the therapy itself.

Rather than driving every visitor to the same destination, the campaign directed each audience to educational landing pages specifically designed for that stage of the patient experience.

The Results

The campaign significantly outperformed the brand’s other programmatic partners across two important measures of audience quality and engagement.

Compared to other programmatic partners, ViralGains delivered:

• 2.2× higher Audience Quality 
• 3.2× higher Engaged Site Reach 

Audience Quality reached a Crossix score of 2.8× in just two months, while Engaged Site Reach climbed to 16%, more than triple the rate achieved by other programmatic partners.

The survey responses also served two purposes at once. The same survey responses used to personalize the customer experience also generated valuable audience insights for the brand team, creating a continuous feedback loop the team could use to improve future messaging and media decisions.

Better Patient Signals Lead to Better Healthcare Advertising

Rare disease marketers face an especially difficult challenge: identifying and engaging small, often underdiagnosed patient populations with information that is relevant to their needs. This campaign demonstrates that understanding what those patients need next is a valuable part of that process. By combining zero-party data with VoiceAlike® AI, the brand was able to deliver more relevant education, improve audience quality, and drive substantially stronger engagement with educational content – all while respecting consumer privacy.

This campaign was powered by VG Health which was recently recognized with the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Award for AdTech Privacy Solution of the Year, honoring its innovative approach to privacy-safe audience intelligence and activation.