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May 19, 2026

By: Shannon Toal, IQVIA Digital and Michael Saffert, CMI Media Group

For years, investment in social media has been viewed as a valuable component of the HCP media mix but its impact and connection to other channels has often proved difficult to quantify. While marketers have long believed in its influence, proving its true impact on prescribing behavior has remained elusive. Today, that’s starting to change.

By connecting deterministic HCP audiences with prescribing-level data and real-time behavioral signals, marketers can move beyond assumptions and finally understand how social media investment contributes across the full journey, from initial exposure all the way through to the actions that help to improve patient outcomes.

In this discussion, Michael Saffert of CMI Media Group shared with Shannon Toal of IQVIA Digital, how enhanced measurement is reshaping the role of social, enabling more precise planning and more confident investment decisions, as well as providing a clearer view of how integrated channels work together to drive results for brands.

Key Takeaways

Moving from correlation to causation: Linking social exposure to prescribing behavior provides a more complete, defensible view of impact and allows agencies and brands to move beyond proxy metrics and towards planning and optimizing with real-world outcomes data.

Social as a proven driver of action, not just awareness: With validated prescribing data within your arsenal, social media can now be positioned as an active contributor to behavior change within your orchestrated omnichannel strategy.

Integration unlocks incremental value: When social and programmatic are planned together using both shared audiences and consistent messaging, marketers can optimize across channels for greater collective impact, not siloed performance.


Interview

Q. How does the ability to tie prescribing level insight to social exposure through Social Traffic Reporting and AIM XR with IQVIA Digital enable CMI Media Group to more definitively assess- and even elevate- the role of social within HCP marketing?

A. Being able to show more than a hypothesized correlation between performance metrics and actual scripts written helps us paint a more complete picture of how multiple touchpoints across different channels work together to drive results.
 
Q. By moving beyond clicks and impressions to authenticated HCP prescribing impact, how is CMI Media Group now able to change the conversation with clients about what social truly drives- and why it is an important part in a comprehensive media mix?
 
A. We have real prescribing data that can speak for itself. In the past it’s often been difficult to prove the value of Paid Social in the media mix, but partnering on tools like this have been a key part of the solution in validating the impact on HCP behavior.
 
Q. With IQVIA’s deterministic HCP audiences and AIM XR measurement in place, what long held assumptions about social’s influence on prescribing can CMI Media Group now validate, (or even reassesses)?
 
A. Some may feel that Paid Social is just good for driving awareness, but that’s not the case. Social can and does drive action, especially when part of an integrated media plan that reaches HCPs with consistent messaging across multiple surfaces.

 

Q. Knowing this, how can CMI Media Group now more deliberately plan social and programmatic in concert, using this overlap as a lever for enhanced impact (as opposed to brands that may have previous managing the channels in isolation)?
 
A. It provides a point to start from, rather than arrive at, which shortens the runway to developing more impactful integrated strategies than span multiple channels.
 
Q. Are there new planning and design opportunities that have opened up for CMI Media Group as IQVIA’s HCP audiences allow overlap across channels to be purposefully engineered by design, rather than left to chance?
 
A. Messaging and creative testing immediately comes to mind. With this framework, we can better analyze what messaging, or combination of messaging has a greater collective impact rather than a siloed view on the channels’ performance.
 
Q. Given these results, how has CMI Media Group evolved its approach to social audience mapping, spend allocation, and testing frameworks in order to optimize for prescribing impact rather than just media scale or volume?
 
A. We will be able to be much more prescriptive (pun intended) in our planning, with better allocation of resources, and collaborate with brand and creative teams in new ways.