Industry — Pharma & Healthcare
Pharma and Healthcare
Marketing Agency
August has worked with AstraZeneca, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott, Biogen and Gador — a category where every claim has to survive medical and legal review before it is published. We bring that discipline to the channel most health brands have not staffed yet: what AI assistants say about you when a patient asks a question instead of typing a keyword.
01 — Diagnosis
What is different about marketing a regulated health brand
Four constraints that generalist agencies discover late, usually in the middle of a launch. None of them are reasons not to market. They are reasons to plan differently from the first week, which is cheaper than replanning in the sixth.
Every word has an approval path
Copy in this category does not go from writer to publish. It goes through medical, legal and regulatory review, and the round trip is measured in weeks, not hours. An agency that has not internalised that will keep proposing calendars it cannot meet and blaming the client for the delay. We write to be approvable — sourced, specific, and free of the claims we already know will not clear — so the rounds get shorter instead of the deadlines getting later.
Half the tactics are simply unavailable
Google and Meta both restrict health advertising: certification requirements, blocked targeting categories, and rules on what a creative may state. Personalised targeting on health conditions is off the table by design in most markets. A media plan built without that map produces a deck that looks great and gets rejected at review, and the loss is not the budget — it is the quarter.
The assistant answers before you do
Health is where people ask rather than search, and a question is what an AI assistant answers directly — with no list of links, and with sources it picked. If your own material is not structured to be retrieved and cited, the answer gets assembled from forums, directories and competitors. In a regulated category, being described inaccurately by a system nobody at your company controls is a compliance exposure, not just lost traffic.
The professional and the patient need different sites
What a prescriber needs to read and what a patient needs to read are different documents with different permissible language, and in most markets they are legally required to be separated. Treating them as one audience with one tone produces material that underserves the clinician and overpromises to the patient — the single most common structural mistake we are handed to fix.
02 — Método
How we work in this category
Three stages, in this order. The first is a deliverable on its own: if you stop after the audit, you still leave with a written record of what the major AI assistants currently say about your brand and your category — including the parts that are wrong, and where they got them.
01
Audit what the machines already say
We run the questions your patients and prescribers actually ask across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini, and record verbatim what comes back: whether you appear, whether you are cited, which sources the answer was built from, and every factual error in it. Deliverable: that transcript, with each inaccuracy traced to the source that produced it. It is the only version of this document that is not an opinion.
02
Build the citable layer
Then we build what was missing: the pages, structured data and plain-language answers that let a model retrieve your position instead of inferring it. Everything is drafted to enter your review process rather than to bypass it — sourced, scoped and written so that medical and legal can approve it without a rewrite. We plan the calendar around your review cycle, not around ours.
03
Re-ask, monthly, and report the deltas
The same questions, re-run every month, against the same record — so the report says whether the answer changed, in which assistant, and what we did that plausibly moved it. When nothing moved, the report says nothing moved. A category this sensitive is the last place to dress a flat month up as progress.
03 — Alcance
What we do, and what we do not
Being explicit about the second list is part of working in this category. An agency that claims the regulatory role it does not hold is a liability to the client who believes it.
AI search visibility (GEO)
Getting your brand retrieved and cited accurately inside AI-generated answers, and correcting what those answers currently get wrong. This is the work the rest of the page is built around.
Organic search and site architecture
The separation of professional and patient material, the technical health of both, and the structure that lets each be found by the audience it is written for — and only by them, where the market requires it.
Paid media within category limits
Google Ads and Meta Ads for health advertisers, planned against what the platforms actually permit in each market before a budget is proposed rather than after a rejection.
Content built to be approved
Patient and professional material written with sourcing attached and claims scoped, in English and Spanish, so that review is a check rather than a rewrite.
Custom AI agents for internal process
Agents built around the workflow you already run — routing, triage, reporting — with the approval step kept human by design. In this category the point of automation is consistency, never removing the reviewer.
Regulatory, medical and legal approval
We are not a regulatory consultancy and we do not sign off on anything. Approval stays with your medical, legal and regulatory teams. We work to make their job faster, and we will tell you when a request should go to them instead of to us.
04 — FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Which pharma and health brands has August worked with?
AstraZeneca, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott, Biogen and Gador. That is six of the twenty-plus brands in the portfolio, and it is the deepest track we have — deep enough that the regulated way of working became the default rather than the exception. What that buys a client is not a logo wall: it is that nobody on the team has to be taught why a claim needs a source before it needs a headline.
Are you a regulatory or medical affairs consultancy?
No, and it matters that we say so. We are a marketing and AI agency that is used to working inside medical and legal review — we write and build so that review can happen quickly and predictably, and we plan timelines that assume it. The approval itself belongs to your medical, legal and regulatory teams, and we would be doing you harm by implying otherwise. Where we add value is upstream of them: fewer rounds, cleaner substantiation, and nothing submitted that was never going to pass.
Why does AI search matter more in health than in other categories?
Because health is the category where people ask a question instead of typing a keyword, and a question is exactly what an AI assistant answers without ever showing a list of links. When the answer is assembled from whatever sources the model finds citable, a brand that is accurate but invisible loses to a source that is visible but wrong — and in this category being described wrong is a compliance problem, not just a marketing one. That is the specific risk this page exists to address.
Can you run paid media for a regulated health product?
Yes, within the limits the platforms and the category impose — and those limits are the first conversation, not a surprise in week three. Google and Meta both gate health advertising behind certification, restricted targeting and pre-approval of claims, and some products cannot be advertised at all in some markets. We map what is actually runnable before proposing a budget, because a plan that gets rejected at review is a plan that cost you a quarter.
Is your Spanish health content written or translated?
Yes, and in health it is not a translation job. Symptom vocabulary, the words patients use for a condition, and what a regulator will accept as wording all differ by language and by market — the Spanish a patient uses in Miami is not the Spanish a regulator approves in Madrid or Buenos Aires. We work out of those three cities, so each side is written by people who sell and get approved in that language rather than by whoever translated the English.
We already have a global agency. What would you do that they don't?
Usually the thing that falls between briefs: what an AI assistant says about the brand when nobody asked it to. Global networks are built around campaigns with start and end dates; the layer this page is about is permanent, unbranded and mostly invisible from a campaign report. We are comfortable working alongside an incumbent on exactly that slice, and we will tell you when the answer is that your existing agency should do it instead of us.
05 — Contacto
Start by finding out what the assistants say
Tell us the questions your patients and prescribers ask, and we come back with what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews answer today — verbatim, with every factual error traced to its source. If the answer is that you are already well represented, that is the answer you get, and there is nothing to sell you.