Managing Operational and Compliance Challenges on Emerging Platforms

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Christian Bullock, digital marketing director at Trialbee, discussed strategies for using nontraditional digital platforms to enhance patient recruitment. He outlined three key factors—audience relevance and intent, content fit and creative potential, and quality of engagement—as critical for determining platform suitability. Bullock explained how platforms such as TikTok, Reddit, and Spotify attract distinct demographics and require tailored messaging, creative formats, and calls to action to support multi-touch recruitment funnels. He highlighted operational and compliance challenges on emerging or entertainment-focused platforms, noting the need for ongoing communication with ad policy teams and careful evaluation of platform restrictions. Bullock shared lessons learned from successful campaigns on Spotify, Nextdoor, and other emerging platforms, emphasizing the importance of testing, monitoring both engagement and conversion, and applying a data-driven approach to optimize ROI while maintaining compliance.

The below interview transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

ACT: What operational or compliance challenges arise when running targeted campaigns on emerging or entertainment-focused platforms?

Bullock: Yeah, great question. There exists a ton of variability around platform policy updates and changes. Emerging platforms often lack healthcare-specific ad policy clarity, which means that we're in frequent contact with ad reps and their teams. With this ambiguity, we want to ensure that we're running entirely clean, compliant campaigns. So sometimes we have to wait until we have some guidelines in place for us to actually start [running] some campaigns on those platforms.

I'll give you two examples specifically that I can share. About the first one: Discord, not so much an emerging platform. It's a solidly popular community platform for individuals, specifically in the Gen Z or millennial age, but they don't really have any type of advertising component at play currently, and that's something that is curious to us. We don't want to start kind of engaging with that platform in a way that is disingenuous, such as joining servers that make a lot of sense for us to join based off of patient populations, and just getting some organic messages in place—it just does not feel good.

So for that example, we're kind of sitting on the sidelines and being really curious again about when they do open up advertising, [after] talking to ad reps, getting some clarity on the healthcare and clinical trial recruitment guidelines specifically, and seeing if we can make a [play] there.

Secondly, we're really curious about how we can get into hobby-specific platforms. So the largest reader community out there, Goodreads, is one we've been keen to look to use—Amazon-owned [platform]. We recently had a discussion with a rep where they stated, “We [do not] allow clinical trial advertisements on their site.” And that's good that we get that clear answer, right, obviously. But we're going to stay in close contact with that rep to ensure if and when they do have any type of opening up to healthcare or medical companies being able to advertise on the platform, we get that clarity into clinical trial recruitment campaigns, what it looks like for geo, etc.

So that's pretty tough. But then I'll make one additional note based off your question, which is: for those maybe non-emerging platforms, more entertainment-focused ones, we know as advertisers, if you have an ad that is in the clinical trial recruitment space, it is likely going to have some type of restriction in place. There's just going to be a restriction when it comes to the amount of audiences that you're selected [for] that can see it, the frequency, etc.

So it seems maybe a little bit silly, but we need to almost be advocates for these advertisements—these non-inanimate objects, I guess you should say—and ensuring that if there's a restriction in place, whether it's on an emerging entertainment-focused platform or maybe even not, that if we think that it's unfairly being slapped with any type of restriction, that we're very quickly talking to ad reps and asking why, first of all, and discovering those answers, and then secondarily, kind of being an advocate for these ads and saying, “Hey, we're playing by your policies stated here, here, and here. Why do we have these restrictions in place?”

So lots of challenges vary by platform, vary by country—even for platforms—and it's always tricky to kind of stay ahead of it, but the most important thing is communication, and communication with those ad policy teams.