Pharma
The growth agency for pharma: promotion that clears review before it clears the calendar.
Isovertic is the growth agency for healthcare, pharma, biotech, medical devices, and life sciences. This page is about pharma: commercial-stage drug makers, specialty and generic manufacturers, and the brand, commercial, and medical affairs teams whose material has to clear medical, legal, and regulatory review before anyone outside the building reads it. If your company is pre-commercial, our [biotech page](/industries/biotech) is closer to your situation. If you sell a combination product or a device arm alongside the drug, the [medical devices page](/industries/medical-devices) covers what changes when the buyer is a clinical engineer or a value analysis committee.
Founders, chief commercial officers, VPs of marketing, brand leads, medical affairs directors, and the medical, legal, and regulatory reviewers who sign off are not the obstacle. The obstacle is a production process that hands review a draft with no source attached, no version history, and a deadline that was set before anyone asked what the claim actually says.
The honest big thing is that pharma promotion fails on process far more often than it fails on creative. Prescription drug advertising carries requirements that consumer marketing does not: the presentation of risk, the relationship between a claim and the approved labeling, and a record that survives inspection. The requirements for prescription drug advertisements sit in [21 CFR 202.1](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-202/section-202.1), and FDA's [Office of Prescription Drug Promotion](https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/office-prescription-drug-promotion-opdp) is the office that reviews it.
We build the site, publish the content, and run the advertising with the review record built into the workflow rather than bolted on at the end. Your reviewer sees the source, the version, and the approver without opening five folders.
We have worked with many independent marketers and digital marketing companies over the years. All promised increased visibility and qualified leads to our site. Every single one fell short, until George Stoff's team at Isovertic. Not only was it easy to work with George, but his team delivered a 300% increase in qualified leads, so much so that we had to then create an automated response workflow to keep up with the demand. Excellent work, George! Highly recommended.
Start with Ground State at $3,000 per month and add the MLR review gate. If your approved claim library already exists and you have $1,000 to $5,000 a month available for Google Ads, Excitation is the next sensible step. Pricing is published.
What you'll take away
- Why a promotional claim needs its approved source attached before the copy moves, not after review asks.
- What an MLR review gate changes for a brand lead, a medical affairs director, and the reviewer who signs.
- How firm communications to health care providers about unapproved uses differ from promotional work.
- Why speaker programs and sponsored content carry risk that a marketing calendar does not see.
- Which package makes sense before a pharma brand team adds another agency.
What actually breaks in pharma marketing
The claim arrives at review without its source
A promotional claim has to trace to the approved labeling or an approved data source. When the draft reaches the reviewer with the claim written and the citation missing, review becomes research, and a two-day cycle becomes two weeks. The fix is upstream: the source is attached when the claim is written.
Risk information is treated as a layout problem
The presentation of risk is a requirement, not a design preference, and it applies across the pieces a brand team ships. When risk is handled at the end by whoever is building the asset, it gets inconsistent across the site, the ad, and the leave-behind. Then review has to catch the same issue three times.
Promotional work drifts toward medical affairs
A brand team wants to answer a real clinical question. Medical affairs owns part of that answer, and the boundary matters. FDA's guidance on communications from firms to health care providers about unapproved uses describes the enforcement policy for that category of communication. Note that the January 2025 final guidance says it is not for current implementation pending an Office of Management and Budget decision on the collection of information, which is exactly the kind of detail your regulatory lead will want to confirm rather than take from a vendor.
Speaker programs are planned like events, not like risk
A speaker program is a marketing activity with fraud and abuse exposure attached. The HHS Office of Inspector General issued a Special Fraud Alert on speaker programs in November 2020 listing the characteristics that raise enforcement risk. Payments to health care professionals are also reportable and publicly searchable through Open Payments. Marketing does not get to plan these alone.
Nobody can reconstruct what was approved
Six months later, a question arrives about a claim on a page. If the answer requires three people and a shared drive archaeology project, the process is the problem, not the page.
What we do differently for pharma
An MLR review gate with a named owner
The usual add-on for pharma is the MLR review gate, $500 to $1,200 per month plus setup. We route each asset to the medical, legal, and regulatory reviewers you name, keep a sign-off log per asset, and maintain an approved claim library your team reuses instead of rewriting. The goal is not to shortcut review. It is to make the review record inspectable.
Claim to source, before the copy moves
Every promotional claim carries its approved source, the population it applies to, its limitation, and its intended audience, recorded at the moment it is written. A brand lead can still write plainly. Plain language does not require dropping the qualification that makes the claim true.
Risk presentation handled as a standard, once
We set how risk information appears across the site, the landing pages, and the campaign assets, then build to that standard everywhere rather than deciding per asset. Review stops catching the same issue in three places.
A boundary between promotional and scientific communication
We work from the approved boundary your regulatory lead sets, then label and route material so a commercial request does not quietly become a medical claim, and so a genuine clinical question reaches medical affairs instead of being answered by a landing page.
Measurement your commercial team can act on
A VP of marketing needs to know which page produced which conversation, and a medical director needs to know that nothing unapproved reached a prescriber. We report cost per qualified meeting alongside the review record, so the commercial number and the compliance record come from the same system.
What actually shows up each month
Every package includes named deliverables, not strategy. On Ground State at $3,000 per month, each month you get one article published on your site, one newsletter sent to your list, eight social posts, one short monthly report, and the website rebuild and hosting spread across the year. On Excitation at $5,000 per month plus advertising spend, you also get one managed Google Ads campaign, one campaign landing page refreshed as needed, an additional eight social posts, automated inbound follow-up, and a monthly strategy call with the account lead. The MLR review gate and the full add-on list are on the pricing page.
Proof, before the pitch
We do not have a published pharma case study yet, and we are not going to borrow one. What we can show you is the closest adjacent work. Ingenious Targeting Laboratory, a mouse-model company selling to research scientists and principal investigators, moved from 13 monthly form submissions to about 64 in its first eight months with Isovertic, and its organic search traffic rose 3.7 times in that period. Internal, September 2026. Those are internal operating results for one account, not a controlled study, and not a promise for a pharma brand with a review gate and a different buyer.
What transfers from that account is the operating shape: attach the claim to its source, publish on a real cadence, make the review record usable, and connect the published work to the conversation it produced. What does not transfer is the timeline. A regulated brand with an MLR gate moves slower in the first quarter than a research-tools company, and we would rather say that now than explain it at month three.
The package you'd probably start on
Start with Ground State at $3,000 per month and add the MLR review gate. That combination gives your reviewer and your brand team a quarter to build the approved claim library and settle the approval rhythm before paid work adds another moving part. It is a 12-month engagement and it includes the website rebuild across the year.
If the claim library already exists, the intake path is approved, and you have $1,000 to $5,000 a month available for Google Ads, Excitation at $5,000 per month plus advertising spend is the next step. We will not recommend paid promotion before the review path can keep up with it.
The honest limits
We cannot speed up an FDA decision, write around your approved labeling, or make a claim your reviewer will not sign. We cannot replace your regulatory, medical, or legal judgment, and we do not offer an opinion on whether a specific piece complies. We can give the people who own those calls a process that is faster to run and easier to inspect.
Disclaimer
This piece is a marketing operating framework, not legal advice. Promotional compliance for pharma depends on your product's approval status, your approved labeling, and applicable FDA regulation and guidance. The controlling sources include 21 CFR 202.1, FDA guidance published through the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion, and the OIG Special Fraud Alert on speaker programs. Consult qualified regulatory counsel before implementing any of the above.
Scientific content is written to terminology controls a molecular biologist on staff set, before it ships to a client's MLR reviewer. That review catches the small terminology mistakes that would waste a reviewer's cycle and delay a launch by a week.
What founders ask first
Yes. We route to the reviewers you name and keep the sign-off log in the format your team already uses. The MLR review gate add-on is $500 to $1,200 per month plus setup, on any package.
No. Your medical, legal, and regulatory reviewers own that call, and so does your regulatory counsel. We own the process that gets them a clean draft with the source attached.
Content writers on staff, working to a claim library and terminology controls set by a molecular biologist on staff, before anything reaches your MLR reviewer. Those controls catch the terminology errors that would otherwise waste a reviewer's cycle.
Yes. We complete your security questionnaire, hand your auditor our subprocessor list and a map of where your data sits for a SOC 2 review, and sign a business associate agreement wherever protected health information is in scope. Quoted per request.
Slower than an unregulated account in the first quarter, because the claim library and approval rhythm come first. We report leading indicators every 30 days and review pipeline and revenue at months six and 12 against your actual sales cycle.
Send us the page your reviewer argued about last.
If you would rather talk it through, book a pipeline call and send us the page your reviewer argued about last, or your best-converting landing page. In about ten minutes we will tell you whether the problem is the claim, the risk presentation, or the process that produced it, and what a rebuild would cost, or whether you need one at all. Sometimes the honest answer is you are already fine, and we are happy to say so and hand you back your afternoon.
George Stoff, Founder and Lead Engineer
Full-stack engineer with more than 30 years building the systems companies sell through. He built the method Isovertic runs on and stays on every account as the standards owner and the escalation path. When search algorithms shift or a compliance question comes up, you get his engineering judgment. Day-to-day execution runs on the team he trained.
LinkedInKristen Coughlin, Chief Operating Officer
Trained molecular biologist. Ten years selling translational research products, then institutional operations at the Yale School of Medicine. She built the delivery operation: took the method George engineered, wrote it down, trained the team on it, and turned it into a repeatable engagement so the same system runs the same way on every account.
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