Authored by Mark Wheeler PM Society Pharma partner and IARIG member.
The slop problem
There is a version of the AI-and-creativity conversation that the industry keeps having, and it goes roughly like this: AI is coming for creative work, standards will fall, and the humans who used to do this for a living will be left in front of a prompt box wondering what happened. It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also, in important ways, the wrong one.
The more uncomfortable observation is that a lot of marketing, including pharmaceutical marketing was already ‘thin’ before a single generative model entered the picture. Campaigns that looked polished but carried no real insight. Messaging that had been through seventeen rounds of medical-legal review and emerged saying nothing in particular with great confidence. Work that was market researched to within an inch of the original brief. The biggest challenge remains; whether anyone notices, cares, or changes their behaviour as a result.
AI didn’t create the old slop, we did. But it will make more of it, faster, cheaper (at some point) and with higher production values. So let’s explore that more
The amplifier problem
What AI really does change is the distance between the origins of an idea and its eventual execution. For someone with real creative instinct, strategic clarity, or genuine in-depth understanding of the HCP or patient they’re trying to influence it’s a big ask. One that agencies used to rely on. Work that would have taken weeks and months can now be explored, iterated, and stress-tested in hours and days.
But the constraint that remains, which cannot be automated away, is the quality of the thinking that goes in. AI is an amplifier. Feed it genuine insight, grounded in how clinicians actually make decisions or a patients actual lived experience of a condition, and you might get something worth amplifying. Feed it a vague brief and a generic market insight, and you get generic at scale, rendered beautifully in seconds, but meaning nothing.
The human in the loop isn’t a regulatory requirement or an ethical nicety. It’s the mechanism by which the whole thing produces value. Remove it, or hollow it out, and what you have is a very efficient machine for generating work that looks right and lands nowhere.
Why this industry can’t afford to get it wrong
In pharma, the stakes of that distinction are not abstract. Communications that don’t genuinely reach HCPs don’t change prescribing behaviour. Patient materials that aren’t rooted in real experience of a condition don’t support adherence. The downstream consequence of slop, in this industry, is measured in the types of outcomes which are a far better reason than any for us to ensure that efficiency doesn’t beat impact.
What good looks like
The recent PM Society Awards offered those in the room a timely reminder that the standard still exists and that people across both agency and client side are still advancing that standard forwards. The energy in the room was different this year. A little defensive energy of an industry bracing for disruption, but overall something far more purposeful and personal. Work being celebrated that had clearly been made by people who understood the difference between finishing something and making something work. ‘Creativity for good’ demonstrated huge interest and passion for storytelling within a single image.
This is the energy that needs bottling up. Not by resisting AI, but by being clear-eyed about what it can and can’t do, and engineering the conditions on both agency and industry sides in which the people who work alongside it are genuinely equipped to use it well. The AI train has well and truly left the station and we all need to be on it, or at least have bought a ticket.
Where Pharmony comes in
At a moment when budgets are under pressure, clinicians are stretched, and the traditional agency model is straining under new demands, the instinct to retreat into denial or drift toward inertia is understandable. Pharmony is a deliberate counter to both. Launched by the PM Society, it’s an industry-wide initiative designed to bring pharmaceutical companies and agencies together – not to paper over tensions, but to share insight, build genuine understanding, and co-create partnership models that are honest and up-to-date about where the landscape has moved.
The Pharmony Summit takes place on 9th June. And will cover a whole host of relevant and important topics. If the question of how to use AI to produce work that genuinely matters is one that you or your organisation is facing, join us to find out more.
Check out the agenda here.