How Cilicant reached 18 times the display click rate on ChatGPT, with NeuGenM and Thrad

The challenge

Many bottles of tablets carry a small packet that nobody thinks about. Without it, moisture gets in and the medicine starts to degrade long before it reaches the patient. Cilicant makes these desiccants and oxygen absorbers in India, for manufacturers who cannot afford to let moisture in.

The largest market for that protection is North America, which accounts for around 40% of global demand for pharmaceutical desiccants. Cilicant had yet to build a presence there, and the buyers it needed were few: large pharmaceutical companies that order in bulk or commission formulations of their own.

“In the US, success meant reaching a small number of very high-value buyers, so a handful of the right enquiries counts as a win,” says Beeraajaah Sswain, Managing Partner and Chief Digital and E-commerce Officer at NeuGenM, Cilicant’s agency.

The approach

Those buyers were changing how they find suppliers. In a 2025 survey by Responsive, 48% of US B2B buyers said they now use generative AI to discover vendors, against 14% in the rest of the world. For a technical product, the first questions come long before any request for a quote: which desiccant suits a tablet bottle, or how to keep oxygen away from a formulation.

Cilicant and NeuGenM ran the campaign in India and the United States, on ChatGPT and on Thrad’s network of AI platforms. In India, the campaign was built to produce a steady volume of enquiries from a broad base of manufacturers. In the United States, it was built to reach the few pharmaceutical companies whose orders matter most.

It was built around the questions those buyers ask, across four product areas from pharmaceutical desiccants to oxygen absorbers, so that Cilicant appeared at the moment a buyer was working out how to protect a product.

The result

In under six weeks, Cilicant’s ads were shown more than a million times across India and the United States, and on ChatGPT in India they drew a click rate of 8.2%, nearly 18 times the average for traditional display advertising (banner ads).

In the United States, the click rate on ChatGPT rose 48% over the first three weeks, and the campaign delivered the result Cilicant wanted: four enterprise enquiries, every one from a large pharmaceutical company, for bulk orders or custom formulations. In that market, a single contract can be worth more than many smaller orders combined.

India supplied the volume it was built for, with 171 enquiries from a broad base of manufacturers by mid-September.

For Cilicant, ChatGPT turned a market where it had no voice into one where large pharmaceutical companies came asking.