Two Different Companies

The first time I walked into Allergan’s offices, I was struck by how different it felt from Takeda, the pharmaceutical company where I’d worked after graduating.

Takeda felt like pharma. Clinical. Methodical.

Allergan Aesthetics felt like a beauty company that happened to make medicines.

I was working on Juvederm and Botox. Medical products requiring HCP expertise: injectors, dermatologists, aesthetic practitioners. But consumer desire drove demand. Patients arrived already educated. Already wanting. The HCP’s role shifted from prescriber to validator.

We engaged consumers with messaging about premium quality. We engaged HCPs with clinical evidence. Two audiences. Two languages. One product at the intersection.

That was 2012. The same year I co-founded what we called the first health consumer agency. We believed consumers were starting to bypass traditional gatekeepers, researching online, forming opinions before seeing a GP.

We were right about the direction. We underestimated the scale.

What GLP-1s Confirmed

I’ve worked on GLP-1 strategy. At first, it felt familiar. The same dual engagement I’d seen at Allergan. Consumers driving demand. HCPs validating. Two audiences, two languages. I noticed the pattern immediately.

But this went further.

The usual rules of pricing, distribution, and promotion have been upended.

Unpaid celebrity endorsements from Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and the Kardashians triggered unprecedented demand. This “Hollywood craze” caused global shortages through 2023 and 2024.

Those shortages created a grey market. Compounding pharmacies emerged offering lower-cost formulations through telehealth and DTC. At peak, 83% of compounded GLP-1 prescriptions were for weight loss rather than diabetes.

Beyond compounding, GLP-1 peptides sold online without prescriptions, marketed as “research use only”. The FDA received over 605 adverse event reports from compounded semaglutide alone.

This isn’t how pharmaceutical markets are supposed to work. But consumers drove it. Not physicians. Not payers. Consumers researching, demanding, finding alternatives when the system couldn’t meet their needs.

What I saw at Allergan was a preview. GLP-1s showed what happens when consumer demand fully takes over.

What’s Driving It

Consumers have more access to health information and data than any previous generation.

42% search for health information weekly. One in three Americans owns a wearable. Continuous glucose monitors, once exclusively for diabetics, are now used by wellness-focused consumers tracking how fasting affects their blood sugar. Apple Watches display VO2 max estimates.

These consumers understand VO2 max as a predictor of longevity. They know what fasting does to insulin sensitivity. They understand why protein timing matters for muscle synthesis. Terms that belonged in exercise physiology textbooks are now common knowledge among the health-curious.

COVID accelerated this. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca went from obscure corporate names to dinner table conversation. 58% awareness for Pfizer. 50% for Moderna. People comparison shopped vaccines. Posted TikToks about being “team Pfizer”.

Pharma companies are responding. LillyDirect. NovoCare. Amgen’s direct platform. 81% of consumers believe pharma should help them get care. 65% expect digital health tools already.

Meanwhile, the best wellness brands are moving toward pharma. Vida Glow has invested over a million dollars in clinical trials. Randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled. OneSkin has published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology with a 12-week double-blind clinical study. A 2025 BeautyMatter analysis described this as the “Pharma-Beauty era,” where rigorous clinical substantiation converges with consumer brand storytelling. Brands with science-led claims attract 2.5 times more venture capital funding than those focused on “natural” narratives alone.

Pharma becoming consumer-centric. Wellness becoming clinical. Meeting in the middle.

The Translation Gap

But here’s the problem.

How do most people actually learn about health?

Word of mouth. Social media. Influencers.

46% of consumers have abandoned a health product due to insufficient evidence. More than half struggle to find clear details on side effects. Those with low digital health literacy seek unreliable sources.

What people believe about health often comes from social media creators who represent science loosely to suit a narrative. If they reference it at all. A study gets reduced to a headline. A mechanism gets simplified into a hack. Nuance disappears. And misinformation spreads faster than corrections.

This happens because of a dangerous regulatory paradox. Pharma companies are bound by strict compliance rules intended to protect patients. They have to be incredibly careful about what a non-HCP sees. But that caution creates a vacuum. And on the internet, vacuums get filled. By influencers who aren’t regulated. By grey market sellers who don’t care about compliance. By anecdotes that sound like data.

How many people have time to read a scientific paper? I don’t. Most people don’t. The evidence exists. The translation doesn’t.

That’s starting to change. AI trained on peer-reviewed research can explain mechanisms in accessible language. Not making claims. Not diagnosing. Translating. Making what’s in the journals accessible to people who will never open them.

The gap between what evidence exists and what people understand may be wider than ever. But for the first time, the tools to close it are emerging.

What I Underestimated

When I started thinking about how to solve this translation problem, I realised how much more complex it is than I’d assumed.

Working with geomapping and location data opened my eyes to the role of place in health. I’d underestimated it completely.

Social determinants account for 60-80% of health outcomes. A JAMA study found neighbourhood SDOH factors explained 63% of variance in premature mortality, even after controlling for violent crime.

Where you live shapes what health challenges you face. What you can access. What messages resonate.

A consumer in a high-stress urban environment has different sleep challenges than someone rural. A fitness enthusiast training for ultramarathons has different needs than someone returning to exercise after years off. A woman managing period pain while training for a marathon needs different guidance than someone sedentary.

The science might be the same. The application is different.

Translation isn’t just about simplifying language. It’s about understanding context. And context is far more diverse than generic personas suggest.

One Health Journey

Someone on a GLP-1 isn’t just managing disease. They’re changing how they eat, exercise, think about metabolic health.

Someone tracking VO2 max isn’t just pursuing fitness. They’re preventing cardiovascular disease, making decisions that belong in clinical conversations.

Someone taking collagen isn’t just pursuing beauty. They’re engaging with joint health, skin ageing: outcomes spanning cosmetic and clinical.

The same person might take an Rx for a chronic condition, use OTC for symptoms, follow a supplement regimen, track biomarkers, adjust exercise based on recovery data.

They don’t experience these as separate categories. They experience one health journey. And that journey happens in a specific place, shaped by specific circumstances.

What Comes Next

I’m not going to claim I know exactly where this is heading. But the signals are there.

The health journey becomes more connected. Not fragmented across pharma, wellness, fitness, beauty, but experienced as one journey by consumers who don’t recognise industry boundaries.

The brands that win will understand this journey in context. Not broadcasting the same message everywhere. Translating science into relevance based on where people live, what barriers they face, what stage of their journey they’re in.

Websites are no longer static content. They’re dynamic experiences. AI can translate the same scientific evidence differently for different contexts. Same science. Different relevance.

Hyperlocal matters. Neighbourhood-level data reveals which communities face specific challenges, what access barriers exist, what messaging resonates. Place shapes health choices in ways generic personas miss.

Here’s what fascinates me. Scientific journals and papers are a treasure trove. How to be fitter. Healthier. Live longer. The evidence is there. But most people will never read these papers. They don’t have time. And when the findings do reach them, journalism spins it into narratives that often miss the point. Or social media reduces it to something unrecognisable.

Brands have a different opportunity. The narrative they can tell is the truth. They’re commercialising what’s in the paper. The innovation. The evidence. If they translate it well, grounded in context, they build trust that no influencer can match.

The brands that figure this out will define the next era of health. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their clinically-proven products lose to creators making claims they can’t substantiate.

That’s where I’m focused now.

Ben Randal leads strategy at Adelo.

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