April Fool's Day is tough for brands. Most fail at it.
I've been part of a few big April Fool's campaigns over the years, and it almost never works. Someone pitches it as "brand awareness." It's not. It requires way more time and energy than it deserves, and at the end of the day, the people inside the company find it funny and everyone else either ignores it or gets mildly annoyed.
The only way to do it well: quick, no expectations, and obviously a joke. Spend 30 minutes on it. Get it approved so it's not over the line. Make it easy to implement. Then move on.
NYT actually nailed this yesterday. One of their newsletter links Rick Rolled readers. Click, laugh, done.
Freshpaint's Privacy Strategy Lead, Xan Spewak, did the same thing with a quick image about "privacy hedges" that our CEO, Ray, posted on LinkedIn. Quick laugh. Everyone moves on. Harmless.
Anyway, no April Fool's jokes here. Here's what I've actually got for you this week...
The chart of the week: Missing awareness channels
Upcoming webinars and live events
Our new integration with Marchex
Fresh take: TV+SMS for healthcare
Jobs, jobs, jobs!
Let's get into it...
Chart of the Week: Missing Awareness
When awareness channels don't get credit, they don't get budget. And when they don't get budget, fewer patients find you.
Only 21% of healthcare marketers invest in DSP and CTV awareness channels. But for the organizations that do, those channels drive 37% of first touches in the patient journey.
The reason most teams aren't investing isn't that awareness doesn't work. It's that last-touch attribution can't see it working. Google closes the conversion, gets the credit, and the budget follows the signal.
The result: a self-reinforcing cycle that starves upper-funnel tactics of the investment they've already earned.
State privacy laws are evolving quickly, and for healthcare organizations, consent is both a legal and measurement challenge.
Many teams feel stuck between tightening compliance controls and preserving the visibility they need to operate.
In this live conversation, Scott Dumas, Corporate Director of Digital Marketing at McLaren Health, and the Freshpaint team share how they're enforcing consent without defaulting to blanket geo-blocking, losing internal visibility, or incurring the months-long implementation headache.
Are you heading to UCA's Urgent Care Convention in Chicago? We're kicking off the conference at Kitty O'Sheas. It's your chance to connect with like-minded leaders in the healthcare marketing space. Come grab a drink, meet the community, and see how others are turning privacy into a real competitive advantage.
Escape the HMPS Summit hustle and join us for Freshpaint LIVE in Salt Lake City. We're gathering a small group of healthcare leaders for a relaxed dinner with great food, honest conversations, and the opportunity to connect with peers. Leave with a few fresh ideas worth bringing back and a few new friends!
Freshpaint LIVE Salt Lake City
📅 Tuesday, May 5
⏰ 6:00PM MT
📍 Laurel Brasserie & Bar (inside The Grand America Hotel)
Most valuable enrollment signals like application starts, plan selections, and completed enrollments often live inside platforms like HealthSherpa and Connecture, leaving payers optimizing toward proxy metrics.
This session explores how leading teams are making that data visibile and actionable within a HIPAA-compliant framework. Learn how to capture and activate real enrollment signals, connect them to your media and analytics stack, and optimize campaigns based on true business outcomes. Plus, see how top payers are applying this approach ahead of the 2027 enrollment period.
From Drop-Offs to Enrollments: Turning HealthSherpa & Connecture Data Into Revenue
Introducing... The Ortho Leaders Circle, a virtual roundtable series held quarterly for ortho leaders navigating patient growth, marketing performance, and compliance.
Upcoming Dates:
📅 Thursday, April 16 @ 2:00PM ET / 11:00AM PT
Each roundtable is designed to bring together peers facing similar challenges to share what's working, compare strategies, and talk through the realities of driving growth in today's environment. If you're in marketing, operations, and compliance in the ortho space, this one's for you!
For most healthcare organizations, the phone is still where patients actually convert. A patient searches, clicks your ad, reads a landing page...and then calls.
And for most marketing teams, that's where visibility ends.
Not anymore.
Freshpaint now integrates with Marchex, bringing call intelligence into your marketing data so you can see how your campaigns actually drive patient conversations and appointments without any PHI leaving your environment.
Here's what this unlocks:
Full-journey attribution - connect digital touchpoints all the way through to inbound calls and scheduled appointments
Conversation intelligence - understand call outcomes, patient intent, and the friction points showing up most
Privacy-first signals - call data linked to marketing performance, no PHI exposure
One view of performance - from first click to care, every team working from the same data
If phone is a major conversion point for your organization (and for most of our customers, it is), this fills a real blind spot.
Pop quiz: Your primetime TV ads are driving traffic, but people aren’t converting. What do you do?
1️⃣ Optimize the landing page
2️⃣ Adjust the offer
3️⃣ Change the CTA
During our conversation on the latest episode of Marketing Rounds, Neil Walker at Oar Health explained why he and his team chose the third option. And it had everything to do with understanding his audience.
Fresh Jobs
Jobs from the industry for anyone searching for their next gig!
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