🎧 Watch this episode:

🔔 Subscribe to the podcast

📖 Or read the summary of the interview:

If you work in life science marketing, you can feel it: the gap between average marketing and great marketing is getting wider. Not because teams suddenly have bigger budgets, but because the tools, channels, and formats available today reward the companies that understand their audience deeply and execute with intention.

That’s exactly what I explored in a recent LinkedIn Live conversation hosted by Supreme Optimization. With me were Eric Southwell, CMO, alongside Mihaela Pupavac, Head of Paid Ads, and Paul Avery, VP Marketing.

We focused on five trends we believe will shape life science marketing in 2026, not as abstractions, but as practical shifts already showing up in campaigns, content performance, and buyer behavior.

Here are the five trends we landed on, and more importantly, why they should change the way you market in 2026:

Let’s start with an idea that sounds wrong until you think about it for ten seconds:

Bing might be one of the best paid search channels in life sciences.

Not “in general.” Not “for everyone.” But specifically for what many of us are trying to do every day: reach scientists in academic labs and technical environments.

Eric kicked off with a story that felt almost too simple to be useful, until it became obvious it was exactly the kind of detail marketers miss. He explained that he went back to his PhD network and asked a basic question: what search engine do you actually use?

“I did a quick survey of some friends of mine in my PhD world… I was expecting that everyone would be using Google.” 

They weren’t.

Because most scientists aren’t researching from a personal MacBook on their couch. They’re at work, in university labs and all of this happens behind IT restrictions and on default settings.

“Most lab scientists are using PCs,” Eric said. “They’re using Edge… and as a result, they’re going to be using Bing.” 

That’s the kind of detail that doesn’t show up in a buyer persona slide, but it shows up in results.

Mihaela confirmed what the campaigns are showing on the ground: Bing isn’t just “working”, it’s getting better.

For some accounts, she pointed out, it’s been delivering lower CPL and the volume of leads coming from Bing has never been so high.

But here’s the catch that Eric identified: “W do a lot of audits and 95% of the companies did not have Bing set up at all.” 

That’s what marketers dream of: demand exists, but competition is asleep.

So here’s the bottom line: in 2026, you might want to give Bing some attention and start taking it more seriously.

Thought leadership used to be a “nice to have.” Then it became a buzzword.

Now it’s becoming a requirement, whether marketing teams like it or not.

Eric shared the signal that made this impossible to ignore: most of Supreme’s inbound leads were asking for it explicitly.

“It was something like 1 in 3 of the contact forms were saying thought leadership.” 

But here’s the problem: thought leadership is one of those phrases that means everything and nothing at the same time.

For some companies, it means:

But if you’ve ever tried to actually do it, you know it’s hard to keep consistency and credibility, without becoming repetitive.

It’s not difficult because of creativity, but because it requires discipline.

I said it during the conversation, and I’ll repeat it here because it’s what kills most initiatives: Thought leadership only works if you show up often enough for people to trust you.

And as I put it on the panel:

“The problem with thought leadership is that it takes time and most people don’t want to invest that time consistently.” 

Another thing we mentioned is the quality of the content you put out because in consumer marketing, you can get away with “good enough” content but in life sciences, credibility is the product.

The most practical model I’ve seen – and shared in the discussion – is also the least glamorous: “What I do with some clients is to get, like, one hour every two weeks with the CEO. And I interview them.” 

That’s it.

Just regular access to someone with actual expertise and a system that turns expertise into publishable insight.

Paul added a key distinction that sharpens what “thought leadership” really is:

“Thought leadership is at least partially owned by a person.” 

And he’s right. Companies can publish content but trust is built through real people.

That’s why founder-led LinkedIn works. Why personal newsletters grow faster than brand pages. Why audiences follow individuals even when they don’t remember the company name.

I framed it like this:

“Thought leadership is tied to a person. Content marketing is more tied to a company.” 

In 2026, thought leadership won’t be measured by how often you publish, it will be measured by whether your audience says: “These people understand my world.”

There’s a reason podcasts are suddenly everywhere in life sciences and it’s not because every company wants to become a media brand, but because podcasting solves a problem that’s getting worse every year: trust takes too long to build.

Paul, who hosts two different podcasts, told a story that captured this perfectly: “I had a conversation with someone I never met before… they spoke to me as if they knew me really well.” 

That person hadn’t met him before, but they’d listened to him. They’d absorbed how he thinks, what he values, how he speaks and what he believes matters.

And that creates something sales decks can’t manufacture: familiarity. This is what psychologists calla parasocial relationship, and it’s a very strong tool in marketing.

It’s the trust you feel toward someone you’ve “spent time with”, even if that time was through headphones during a commute.

But to me, the bigger shift is happening in how podcasts are discovered. I pointed out that podcasts aren’t just living inside podcast apps anymore, and a lot of them are now discovered through YouTube.” 

That matters, because YouTube isn’t a library, but a distribution engine.

Eric connected the dots: YouTube isn’t just good for reach, it’s increasingly showing up inside Google’s AI-driven experiences too, like its AI Overview. 

Then he said something that reframes the whole podcast conversation: “I actually don’t think of it as a podcast anymore. I think of it as a content production engine.” 

That’s the mindset shift. The episode isn’t the only asset. The episode is the source file.

From one conversation, you can extract:

In 2026, the companies that win with podcasting won’t be the ones with the best production quality. They’ll be the ones who treat podcasting as a content system built on trust.

No one on the panel pretended AI wasn’t important, but we also didn’t pretend it was a magical solution to all marketing problems.

Mihaela brought the conversation down to earth: yes, AI can help generate content and creative faster, but in scientific marketing, speed is not the bottleneck, accuracy is.

“It’s very good… but you still need that human oversight”, she said.

I made the point bluntly, because it’s the part many marketers don’t want to say out loud: “AI helps you produce content faster… but it doesn’t make it better.” 

Paul nailed the real risk with a sentence that should scare every life science marketer just enough to be useful: “It creates something that sounds fantastic… but it has no meaning.” 

And that’s the danger zone, because AI is excellent at producing language that sounds polished, but in life sciences, sounding polished isn’t what earns trust.

You need substance to gain trust.

Mihaela summarized what might be the most important AI framing going into 2026: “AI is an amplifier. If you know what you’re doing, it will make you faster. If you don’t, it will amplify that you don’t know.”

Bottom line: In the short term, AI gives everyone the power to publish more. In the long term, it makes it easier than ever to tell who’s publishing without expertise.

In 2026, the brands that win won’t be the ones who use AI the most, they’ll be the ones who use AI to scale something real.

The final trend wasn’t about tactics, it was about the shape of the buyer journey, because something important is changing and we can already see it in the data.

Eric shared that in some pipeline tracking, AI tools were showing up as meaningful sources of leads: “We’re seeing about 10 to 12% coming from things like ChatGPT and Perplexity.” 

Mihaela added the nuanced version: for many accounts, AI traffic is still low in their Google Analytics results, but the pattern is clear and companies with strong SEO foundations tend to show up more often in AI results as well. 

Then I threw in a line that was intentionally provocative: “GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is basically a scam.” 

I’m not saying that because AI search doesn’t matter, on the contrary, I truly believe that AI search will overcome other traffic acquisitions channesl in the future, but because a lot of what’s being sold as “GEO strategy” is just old SEO wisdom repackaged in a new language.

If you were already doing the right fundamentals – useful content, strong authority, consistent publishing – you don’t need to reinvent your strategy, you just need to double down on what works.

And critically, paid search isn’t disappearing. Mihaela made this point clearly: “They might research in ChatGPT, but when they’re ready, they still go to Google.” 

This is the reality of buying behavior: AI changes exploration, but decisions still demand validation, and as Paul summarized so well, the bottom of the funnel is rarely won at the bottom of the funnel. 

When the stakes are high, buyers choose what feels safe and “safe” is often the brand they’ve already learned to trust.

That’s why Eric’s line hits hardest as a final takeaway: “Experts will win.” 

Not influencers. Not volume publishers. Not content factories. Just real experts, with something real to say.

If you’re still reading this post, you might start to realize that this wasn’t a conversation about “new hacks.” It was a conversation about what happens when you throw a bunch of AI disruptors into life sciences marketing:

So what wins?

A sharper strategy built on fundamentals:

1) Go where your audience actually searches (yes, including Bing)

2) Build thought leadership around real people, not just brand channels

3) Turn podcasts into a trust engine, then amplify the best moments

4) Use AI to accelerate expertise, not to imitate it

5) Own the bottom-of-funnel by earning top-of-funnel credibility

Because in a world where everyone can generate content in seconds, the differentiator isn’t output, it’s substance, consistency and a point of view your audience can recognize.