The booth is the second conversation, not the first.

An Advertising Week panel this week put numbers on something congress teams have been working around for two years. eMarketer reports that 52 percent of US patients ask their physician for a specific medication, and 68 percent of clinicians say those requests have grown over three years.

Most congress booths are still built as though the clinician is where persuasion starts. On that panel's reading, the clinician is often where it gets confirmed. The patient arrived at the appointment with a name already in mind, picked up somewhere nobody in the booth has visibility into.

That does not make the booth less important. It changes what the booth is for. A room built to introduce a therapy and a room built to arm a clinician for a conversation already in progress are not the same room, and they do not carry the same narrative.

The booth's real audience has already had the conversation somewhere else. The booth is the second one.