Press releases are dead. The future of pharma comms is alive

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – 2026 communications planning season.
As Q1 speeds towards us, now is the perfect moment to take stock, tear up last year’s roadmap and get ready to shake things up.

Comms has always been fast, but what’s happening now isn’t evolution – it’s a total rewrite. The platforms and voices that hold sway over patients and HCPs look radically different from how they did just a few years ago.

The old model of ‘pushing’ a message is dead. The new game is about earning trust, proving your humanity and co-creating. Staying relevant means actively participating in this evolution – not ignoring, coasting or simply reacting to it.

Here are the five key evolutions UK pharma comms need to act on to unlock success in 2026 and beyond.

You know that the demographics of your audience are changing. An increasingly large slice of both patients and newly qualified NHS professionals are millennials and Gen Z. But why does this shift matter? It’s because these generations have a fundamentally different relationship with information.

The data shows a clear trend: younger UK audiences have a ‘flatter hierarchy of trust’. They are often as likely to trust a specialist creator as they are a traditional institutional voice.

They are not waiting for a leaflet, they would never think to pick up a newspaper with their weekly shop and most of them have never watched the 10pm news on TV.

Instead, they’ll watch live news streams on TikTok seconds after stories break, and they’ll take their medical questions to qualified dermatologists on TikTok, or specialist nurses explaining complex conditions on YouTube, or patient advocates building powerful communities on Instagram.

This trend also applies to HCPs. While the BMJ and The Lancet remain gold-standard reference points, the discovery phase for information is changing.

The first port of call is probably an AI-powered search tool, trained on niche trade press titles as well as social-source information and sharing platforms like Reddit.

The digital-native doctor, pharmacist or nurse is sourcing peer-to-peer insights from closed professional networks and even ‘MedTok’ for up-to-date explainers.

This presents a huge opportunity for pharma to engage in educational partnerships with these new, vetted and trusted voices and to discover new emerging media brands with which to diversify PR efforts.

The compliance challenge is significant but not insurmountable, demanding an evolution away from rigid message control and towards a navigation of regulatory codes in a way that allows for an authentic voice.

The risk of ceding control is high, but the risk of being ignored by sticking to old channels is even higher.

Tired of noisy public feeds, full of ads? So is everyone else. The biggest shift in community building is happening in private spaces like WhatsApp groups, invitation-only Slack and Discord channels and subscription Substack newsletters.

People are actively curating their inner circle, seeking to surround themselves with people with shared goals and passions. This is where niche communities are thriving; humans sharing knowledge, experiences and encouragement with other humans!

This presents an exciting, if difficult, opportunity. You cannot advertise your way in. But you can be invited, if you provide genuine value. This means a radical shift from ‘comms’ to ‘service’.

Could you provide a set of resources for a patient support group on WhatsApp?  Could you offer your super-smart CMO to run a Q&A in a private forum? Could you sponsor a niche Substack to keep it free for its community?

The challenge is that this model is not scalable and you cannot measure it with traditional reach metrics. The ROI isn’t in ‘impressions’; it’s in deep, long-term trust and advocacy, which is a much harder metric to get sign-off on but is ultimately far more valuable.

With a whopping 2 million articles, posts and videos published daily, LinkedIn is no longer just a digital CV and recruiter playground. In 2026, it’s the primary platform where UK pharma companies, NHS Trusts and life sciences leaders are building credibility. But the rules for success have changed too.

Polished, ‘we are pleased to announce’ corporate fluff dies a quiet death; self-serving promotional content is ignored; AI-generated ‘opinion’ pieces lead to unfollows.

The content that wins is human, relevant and fresh. It has photos (or even better, videos) that stop the scroll. Overwhelmingly, posts from people – especially senior leaders – outperform posts from brands by a massive margin.

The opportunity lies in empowering your experts. Your CEO, your Medical Director, your Head of Patient Advocacy – these are your most effective storytellers.  Encouraging them to share content that highlights the joy in the mundanities of their daily work, their personal connection to the company mission or a powerful reflection on an industry-wide problem.

The challenge here is entirely internal. It means getting legal and compliance teams comfortable with ‘authentic’ (read: not pre-scripted) content.

This requires a shift from slow, line-by-line approval to a ‘guard rails’ model, where leaders are trained on the ‘no-go’ zones (especially regarding the promotion of prescription-only medicines) but are otherwise free to engage as human beings.

It’s official: absolutely no-one wants to ‘hop on a quick call’ with you. Digital fatigue is real, and no Zoom webinar can replace the energy and relationship-building of a face-to-face meeting.

The medical and pharma conference circuit, from NHS Confed to HLTH and JPM, is back in full swing. But their often sky-high prices and unpredictable ROI have left a chasm for an alternative. In 2026, smaller, more curated and more meaningful offline experiences will become the premium.

This begs the question: instead of pouring the entire budget into a flashy booth at the ExCeL, why not host a smaller, invitation-only expert roundtable in a relevant, unique venue? Or, for patient comms, supporting hyper-local patient meetups?

The primary challenge is cost and budget reallocation. It’s expensive, and you might need to work hard to convince purse-string-holders that the deep relationships built at one intimate gathering are more valuable for long-term advocacy than the 3,000 badge-scans from a trade show booth.

Finally, let’s talk traditional media. While new channels are fragmenting the landscape, the authority of a story in a top-tier UK national, or a respected trade magazine (cough cough, PharmaTimes), remains unmatched for building credibility. But the way to get that story has changed profoundly.

The UK media industry is being squeezed hard by falling ad revenues and changing audience habits. This means there are fewer journalists, working under more intense deadlines, trying to produce more high-quality content than ever before.  For comms professionals, this means thinking outside of the press-release-shaped box.

Your 2026 media strategy must be built on creativity and value. Success now lies in building meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships with a smaller, more relevant group of journalists and producing unique story ideas that will capture the attention of their audiences.

This means understanding that a time-poor health correspondent is not an amplifier for your key messages. Stop pitching at them and start helping them produce quality stories!

Make use of the resources at your fingertips. Offer a key journalist an exclusive pre-briefing with a clinician, provide a unique data set for the clinician’s story or connect the journalist with a patient who can bring the story to life with the patient’s own experiences. In 2026, you don’t ‘pitch’ a story; you co-create it.

For all its incredible technology, the health sector is still, fundamentally, humans helping humans. So, it’s no surprise that the most successful comms strategies are now the most human ones.

This year’s winners will be those who truly understand where their audiences are spending their time, and then go the extra mile to meet them there with creative, high-value and authentic engagement.