And...that’s it. No follow-up. No context. Just a deeply unsettling question. I think about it daily now. What is a booth boss? Am I the booth boss? Are you the booth boss?
But really, what does Andy expect me to do with that email? Should I forward it to our Head of Events with no explanation? Should I reply and ask for more details? Should I become the booth boss?
These are the kinds of existential marketing questions that haunt me.
While I spiral, here’s what you actually came here for:
A major upgrade to Ad Performance
Upcoming events (including a lockpicking event)
A breakdown of Demand-Side Platforms
An obituary for healthcare websites
Let's get into it...
Product Update
We just rolled out a major upgrade to Ad Performance: end-to-end user journey tracking.
What’s that mean?
You can now track the devices associated with specific ad campaigns.
You can see a timeline that shows the exact paths patients take after clicking an ad.
Marketers finally get full visibility into the customer journey, from ad click to appointment. It’s a huge help for understanding what’s working, optimizing campaigns, and improving user experience.
This new upgrade is available to every Ad Performance customer who’s ever wondered what happens after the click.
It’s live now—go take a look inside Ad Performance.
Join us for an unforgettable evening at Knife Italian Steak, where Michelin-starred Chef John Tesar is redefining Texas dining with bold flavors, Italian influences, and a stunning atmosphere. Connect with fellow healthcare marketers over incredible food, great conversation, and a community that’s shaping the future of healthcare marketing. Sign up now!
On-Demand Webinar In this on-demand webinar, we’ll show you how to enhance ROI by linking appointment data to your campaigns, supercharge your Google Ads performance with accurate data for better bidding, and gain end-to-end insights into the patient journey. You'll also get a chance to explore how to optimize your marketing budgets with privacy-compliant ROI insights to help secure growth.
Join marketing and healthcare strategy leaders as they explore the results of an insightful survey on payer marketing, shedding light on how payers are allocating budgets, implementing funnel strategies and tackling privacy challenges to drive growth and compliance in an evolving landscape. Watch the webinar here.
Freshpaint's Compliant Corner
Can healthcare marketers use programmatic DSPs without crossing privacy lines?
Short answer: yes...but only with the right setup.
Demand-side platforms (DSPs) like The Trade Desk or StackAdapt can be incredibly effective for reaching the right audiences and scaling campaigns. But in healthcare, they come with possible compliance risks.
If you’re sending data directly to a DSP, especially URLs or metadata that suggest a person’s health status, you could be crossing into PHI territory without meaning to.
The key is controlling how data is collected and shared. With the right setup, you can run high-performing programmatic campaigns while staying compliant. That means anonymizing user data, stripping out anything sensitive, and keeping a clean separation between identity and engagement signals.
This unfortunate obituary (using that term loosely here) came out right after the Freshpaint 5 was published last week, but it's A Big Deal...
Google just expanded its AI Overviews for health-related searches, covering thousands more topics and languages. That might sound helpful, but it’s bad news for health system websites. Why? Because when AI Overviews appear, organic clicks to websites drop by 70%.
A recent analysis found that local health systems like Mass General didn’t show up at all in search results for common condition queries. Instead, nearly every result came from just a handful of sources: Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, NIH, and crowd-sourced platforms like Reddit.
The big takeaway: patients are getting their answers before they ever reach your site, and they may never click through at all. The role of the website is shifting from SEO-driven content hubs to conversion-focused tools. Think less “online brochure,” more “app for scheduling and admin tasks.”
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