The pharmaceutical marketing industry doesn’t lack for challenges right now. Budgets are under pressure, clinicians have less time than ever to give, and AI is rewriting how work gets briefed, made, and measured almost in real time. The PM Society’s Pharmony June summit at the Royal Society of Medicine, held under the banner “From chaos to collaboration,” brought pharma marketers, medical affairs and procurement professionals, and agency leaders together for honest conversation about what needs to change. That appetite for shared problem-solving promises to be continued at the PMi Awards on 17th September at The Brewery, London — and for a pharma marketer weighing up a limited events budget, the case for being in that room is worth setting out plainly.
See the best work being made, not just your own. It’s easy for a brand team to lose sight of what “great” looks like when they’re only ever comparing their campaigns against last year’s. The PMi Awards put every category’s best work in the room at once — the AI-driven Vitiligo Mirror that Flipside Health and Corbin Comms built for Incyte Biosciences, the congress experience Tangent90 delivered for Alnylam, and dozens more finalists across categories from patient support to internal communications. Sitting through that in one evening is a faster way to recalibrate expectations than any number of trend reports.
Meet the agencies winning, not just pitching. Procurement processes compare capability decks well; they’re less good at showing how an agency behaves under pressure or what it’s like to work with them. An awards night does both. Watching who wins, and hearing why judges rated the work, gives pharma marketers a shortlist tested against real outcomes rather than a polished pitch. The 2025 results brochure offers a useful map of who’s currently doing standout work: Costello Medical, Camino Communications, Flipside Health, Corbin Comms and Tangent90 among the agency winners, alongside pharma brands including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Roche Diagnostics, Takeda, Philips, Chiesi, Santen, Valneva, Alnylam, Incyte Biosciences and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. For a marketer scoping a new partnership, that’s a room full of due diligence already done.
Reward the people who did the work. Campaigns get signed off by committees, but they get made by individuals — the brand manager who fought for a braver idea, the medical affairs lead who made a technical concept usable, the team that stayed late before a congress deadline. An awards night is one of the few moments where that effort is recognised publicly, in front of peers, rather than folded quietly into a performance review. Sending a team isn’t just a perk; it’s a way of telling them their work matters beyond the four walls of the office.
Build relationships that outlast any one project. The best partnerships rarely start with a formal pitch. They start with a conversation over dinner, or a simple “we should talk” between two people who’ve just watched the same category play out. Against the backdrop Pharmony has named so clearly — tightening budgets, stretched clinicians, AI reshaping how work gets done — those informal relationships are what make collaboration hold together when things get difficult.
For the investment of an evening, the PMi Awards offer pharma teams a concentrated dose of inspiration, intelligence, and connection that’s hard to replicate elsewhere. It’s not just a night out — it’s one that pays back in sharper thinking and stronger partnerships for months to come.