By Samer Bejjani, co-founder of Shootday, a global photography and video production partner for businesses, operating across 150+ cities worldwide.
Pharmaceutical companies spend enormous sums bringing clinicians, researchers, and specialists together. Congresses, advisory boards, symposia, and educational meetings are the key fora through which the industry exchanges information. Entire commercial calendars are built around them, and teams spend months preparing for a few days of interaction. Then, once an event ends, much of what made it valuable simply disappears.
The loss is hard to quantify. Presentations are usually archived somewhere, but the context around them is not: the discussion of the data, the nuance in how clinicians respond to new findings, the informal exchanges between specialists, and the moments where expertise becomes visible in a way corporate communications rarely manage to reproduce. These are often the most credible and intellectually useful parts of a medical conference, yet they are also the least likely to survive.
Instead, most event output collapses into documentation. Photographs of exhibition stands. Crowd shots. Recap videos. Carefully controlled summaries. The event is recorded, but very little of its actual intelligence is retained in a form that can engage people afterwards.
That is surprising, given how much value the industry places on peer credibility. Healthcare professionals consistently report trusting peer discussion and clinically led education more than direct promotional messaging, and that dynamic underpins the majority of pharmaceutical communication. Medical conferences exist, in part, because expertise from other clinicians carries more weight than expertise from organisations. Yet companies still treat conference content as though its main purpose is to prove attendance.
Part of the problem is structural. Medical events are operationally complex and heavily regulated. Compliance review shapes what can and cannot be captured, particularly where scientific claims, off-label discussion, or patient information may surface, and legal and medical teams understandably prioritise caution. But caution alone does not explain why events are so underrepresented in official marketing channels.
There is a real difference between recording that an expert spoke and capturing why people stopped to listen: the anticipation before a presentation, the debate that follows a clinician’s answer, the points of disagreement between specialists, the questions carried forward into hallways and dinners. These moments show expertise in motion rather than as a polished final position, and they are more credible for it.
They are also the moments corporate communications struggle to accommodate. The pharmaceutical industry has become highly proficient at controlling information, and in many ways it has to be. But the same instinct for control can get in the way of communication. Congresses are one of the few settings where pharmaceutical companies, clinicians, researchers, and other healthcare professionals interact in a way that feels professional yet informal. That informality is a large part of what makes these events valuable, which is why reducing them to a handful of safe social posts and a post-event summary feels so inadequate.
This matters more now because of how professional medical audiences have come to consume information over the past decade. Short-form video and peer-led commentary circulate constantly across professional platforms, and the sheer volume of available information has made trustworthy interpretation more valuable than ever.
Medical conferences already meet that need. A respected specialist explaining how they read emerging trial data will often carry more weight than a heavily scripted campaign trying to make the same point indirectly. A thoughtful disagreement between clinicians can generate more genuine engagement than an entire library of polished branded content. The problem is that many organisations fail to see the event as the start of a longer communication cycle rather than the end of one.
Capturing that value takes intentional planning: identifying the voices worth interviewing and agreeing how footage will be used before the event begins, rather than assembling something from whatever happens to have been filmed on the day. In our work covering corporate events, the footage that goes to waste is rarely a quality problem. It is usually that no one decided, in advance, who was worth interviewing or which channel each clip was meant to feed.. A pre-production brief covering target audiences, compliance constraints, and intended channels is what separates a content asset from a record of attendance.
Pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in building trust and authority around scientific expertise, while failing to make the most of the industry’s most credible human moments. The most important material generated at a medical event is often not what is presented on stage, but the uncertainty and peer engagement happening around it.
Those qualities are difficult to manufacture, and increasingly they are exactly what professional audiences want to see.
