On October 7, 2026, Tunnl, an audience intelligence company based in Arlington, Virginia, said it had partnered with DeepIntent to make its opinion-research segments available inside DeepIntent's healthcare programmatic platform, according to Tunnl. The segments describe people by hesitancy toward care, attitudes to risk and comfort with digital services rather than by age or diagnosis. Neither company disclosed pricing, segment counts or campaign results.

In Short

Tunnl, which turns opinion polling into groups of people that advertisers can target, and DeepIntent, an ad-buying platform for drugmakers and health brands, said on October 7, 2026 that Tunnl's groups will be usable inside DeepIntent's system. Health advertisers usually sort people by age or illness, so groups based on things like reluctance to seek care or comfort with online health services give them a different way to decide who sees an ad. The announcement contains no prices, group sizes or results, so how well the new groups perform is not yet public.

What the companies describe

Tunnl, which calls itself an AI-powered audience intelligence platform, said in a release dated October 7, 2026 that marketers can reach its research-backed audience segments through DeepIntent's programmatic setup for health advertisers, according to Tunnl. The integration, in the release's wording, brings differentiated audience solutions to a category where "privacy expectations, regulatory requirements, and sensitive health decisions make patient communication especially complex."

The segments draw on recent opinion research. According to Tunnl, that research adds four dimensions to campaign planning for marketers who have organised audiences mainly by demographics or condition: hesitancy toward seeking care, attitudes toward risk, openness to digital healthcare services, and the factors that encourage engagement. The release illustrates the idea with three patients who share a demographic profile and a healthcare need. One is hesitant about seeking care, another needs caregiver support to navigate the system, a third prefers digital services to save time. Demographic and condition-based categories alone, Tunnl says, do not explain those differences.

Sara Fagen, chief executive and co-founder of Tunnl, put the argument this way: "Demographics and conditions provide part of the picture, but they don't fully explain what makes someone hesitant to seek care." According to DeepIntent, marketers are turning to partners with access to a wide range of audience solutions as the advertising environment grows more complex. Natalie Mancuso, senior vice president of data partnerships at DeepIntent, said the company is "bringing new dimensions to how healthcare and pharma marketers better understand the audiences they are trying to reach."

Tunnl's own description is useful for placing it. According to the company, it was founded in 2021 by Fagen and Brent Seaborn, whom it describes as data and political strategy veterans, and it serves Fortune 500 brands, media agencies, trade associations and advocacy organisations. It says its platform connects survey research, insights, audience targeting, activation and campaign measurement in a single closed-loop product. Healthcare, the release adds, is "just one application": the same modelling approach is said to support consumer, advocacy, media and political audiences, and Tunnl expects to add further activation partnerships. It names none.

Where the deal sits in DeepIntent's stack

DeepIntent describes itself as a healthcare demand-side platform, and PPC Land's coverage over the past 14 months shows a company that has mostly been adding places to buy and tools to plan. In August 2025 it rolled out a streaming package for free ad-supported channels. On March 19, 2026 it opened Helix, a marketing cloud covering 3.7 million providers and 240 million patient lives, figures reported in coverage of its later agentic planning tool.

Late May brought a burst of supply. On May 26, 2026, epocrates opened its clinician workflow to programmatic buying through DeepIntent, giving access to more than one million active clinicians. Within days, three supply deals with OptimizeRx, epocrates and Lane4.io brought point-of-care placements into the same buying interface, spanning six electronic health record systems and 158,000 doctors. June 9 added verified live sports inventory, and an August integration with Vistar Media extended the reach to digital out-of-home screens.

Tooling followed. On September 10, 2026 DeepIntent opened Cora, a conversational planning layer, as an open beta to all clients, with a claimed 50% cut in planning time. The same coverage describes a push into market research, forecasting and linear television, a long way from the auction pipes where the company started. A partnership with a company whose product starts from opinion research sits comfortably inside that direction of travel, though the release itself draws no such line.

The Tunnl arrangement differs in kind from most of those moves. Supply additions widen where an advertisement can run. A data partnership changes the question of who is considered worth reaching, and on what basis. The release does not say whether the segments live inside Helix, in the standard bidding environment, or both.

What the release leaves out

The announcement is short on specifics. It gives no pricing, no count of available segments, no description of how large or how recent the underlying opinion research is, and no geographic scope. It does not say whether the segments are aimed at patients, at clinicians or at both, although the text speaks of patients throughout. It describes no modelling method beyond calling the approach research-backed, and it names no pharmaceutical brand or agency using the segments.

Regulation gets similarly light treatment. DeepIntent's boilerplate calls its marketing "privacy-safe", but the release does not mention HIPAA, the 1996 US law governing protected health information. The statute has no certification scheme, so the phrase "HIPAA-compliant" describes a self-assessment rather than an audit, and a recent DeepIntent release for Cora likewise dropped the word in favour of privacy-safe framing without explanation. Whether the omission means anything cannot be read from the text.

Performance claims are thin as well. DeepIntent's description of itself says its platform delivers measurable audience quality and script lift at scale, and script lift, the change in prescription volume that a campaign can be shown to have produced, is the currency in which pharma budgets tend to be graded. Such studies are observational rather than experimental, so they estimate association, not causation. The release offers no script lift figure for Tunnl's segments. The strongest effectiveness language comes from Mancuso, who said the segments enable clients "to build more effective and relevant campaigns." Tunnl's own framing is more modest: more ways to understand decisions, more options for education and service awareness.

Identifiers are the other gap. The release does not explain how modelled segments are attached to individual devices or records once they reach a bidder. That matters because regulators are paying closer attention to the keys that link health-related data to people. Italy's data protection authority fined IQVIA 7 million euros over the records of roughly one million patients that the company had described as anonymous, in a decision adopted on September 23, 2026 and published on October 2. The regulator's reasoning was that a hash built to preserve uniqueness does not make a record anonymous. Tunnl's segments rest on opinion-research modelling rather than clinical records, so the ruling is context rather than comparison. It does show the sort of question a health data partnership can attract.

Why it matters to marketers

DeepIntent describes its platform as uniting media, identity and real-world clinical data, signals that record what has happened to a person. Attitudinal research tries to capture something else: how a person thinks about care, risk and digital services. The Helix figures above give a sense of the clinical side's scale, and Tunnl supplies the other kind. Whether the combination improves outcomes is the open question, since the release asserts added dimensions, not added performance.

There is also a cross-category angle. Tunnl lists politics among its categories, and the partnership lands four weeks before the US midterm elections on November 3, 2026, in a cycle that AdImpact projects at $11.6bn of political advertising. The release does not say whether the healthcare segments and the political ones share research panels or modelling, and it gives no sign that they do.

The open items are simple to list and hard to answer from the text: cost, scale, freshness, matching method and measured lift. None is covered. Until DeepIntent or Tunnl publishes figures, or a pharma advertiser reports a study, the partnership adds an option to the menu with no public evidence of what it delivers or costs.

Timeline

  • 2021 - Tunnl is founded by Sara Fagen and Brent Seaborn, according to Tunnl.
  • August 21, 2025 - DeepIntent debuts its HealthFirst FAST Package for streaming advertising.
  • March 19, 2026 - DeepIntent opens Helix, a HIPAA-ready cloud covering 3.7 million providers and 240 million patient lives.
  • May 26, 2026 - epocrates opens programmatic access to more than one million active clinicians via DeepIntent.
  • Late May 2026 - DeepIntent closes three point-of-care supply deals with OptimizeRx, epocrates and Lane4.io.
  • June 9, 2026 - DeepIntent adds verified live sports and events inventory for pharma buyers.
  • June 15, 2026 - DeepIntent rolls out Helix AI, with beta results showing a 50% cut in planning time.
  • August 2026 - Vistar Media's point-of-care and digital out-of-home inventory enters DeepIntent's platform.
  • September 10, 2026 - DeepIntent opens Cora to all clients as an open beta.
  • September 23, 2026 - Italy's data protection authority adopts its decision fining IQVIA 7 million euros; it is published on October 2.
  • October 7, 2026 - Tunnl and DeepIntent partnership release, according to Tunnl.

Summary

  • Who: Tunnl, an AI-powered audience intelligence company in Arlington, Virginia, founded in 2021 by Sara Fagen and Brent Seaborn, and DeepIntent, a healthcare marketing platform. Fagen is Tunnl's chief executive and co-founder; Natalie Mancuso is DeepIntent's senior vice president of data partnerships.
  • What: A partnership making Tunnl's research-backed audience segments, defined by hesitancy toward care, risk attitudes, digital openness and engagement drivers, available through DeepIntent's healthcare programmatic platform.
  • When: The release is dated October 7, 2026. No availability date is given.
  • Where: The release is datelined Arlington, Virginia. It names no markets, and geographic scope is not stated.
  • Why: According to the companies, demographic and condition-based categories do not explain why similar patients act differently, and research-backed segmentation adds attitudes, motivations and engagement preferences to audience planning. For DeepIntent it widens the range of audience solutions; for Tunnl it adds an activation partner beyond its other categories.