This week marks two years of this newsletter. It started as a simple idea from our Head of Event Marketing, Yvette: "Hey, we should do a newsletter!" And me, being a lover of email, said, "Heck yes, but only if I can do it my way."
My way was to make the newsletter itself valuable with the ultimate goal of making it the best newsletter for healthcare marketers. Something you'd actually look forward to reading. Something personal, like I'm writing to one person, not a list.
The anniversary doesn't really matter. What matters is whether I'm living up to that promise: making this the best newsletter for healthcare marketers.
So...how am I doing? Tell me what you love, what you hate, and what you want more of. I'm serious. Give me real feedback, and I’ll pretend not to take it personally.
Anyway, let's get on with it. Here's what I've got for you this week:
New Audiences Integrations
Freshpaint in Asheville
Catch our on-demand webinar about Freshpaint Audiences
Healthcare moves another step closer to retail
Or does it?
Banned from advertising
Let's go...
Product Update: New Audiences Integrations
Two new destinations just landed in Freshpaint Audiences: Viant and StackAdapt — giving you more flexibility to activate privacy-first, high-performance campaigns.
If you read nothing else in this email today, read this: That means retargeting, lookalikes, and exclusion lists are now available on both ad platforms through Freshpaint Audiences.
Viant Viant is an AI-powered ad-buying platform built for the open web, helping marketers reach audiences across channels with transparency, precision, and scale.
With this integration, you can now:
Send compliant audience segments from Freshpaint directly into Viant
Use email and IP address identifiers for targeting and exclusion
Run programmatic campaigns confidently without compromising privacy
Coming soon: Support for phone number identifiers to give you even more flexibility when sending audiences to Viant.
StackAdapt StackAdapt is a leading AI-powered DSP that helps marketers reach and re-engage audiences across native, display, CTV, video, audio, in-game, DOOH, and email — all from a single platform.
With this new integration, Freshpaint customers can now:
Safely activate first-party audiences using email and IP address identifiers
Retarget or exclude audiences in StackAdapt while maintaining HIPAA alignment
Reach patients and consumers across the full funnel, from awareness to conversion
Ready to get started? Contact your Freshpaint Account Manager today.
Upcoming Freshpaint LIVE Events
Join a growing community of healthcare marketers, digital leaders, and privacy champions who are rewriting the rules of patient engagement. At Freshpaint LIVE, you'll connect face-to-face with industry peers, learn from bold innovators, and explore how to deliver high-performance marketing without compromising patient privacy.
This is your front-row seat to real-world strategies, practical insights, and candid conversations that are shaping the future of healthcare marketing. We’re bringing the community to you. Check out where we are headed next below.
📍 The Market Place, 20 Wall St, Asheville, NC 28801
Join us for an intimate dinner at The Market Place, one of Asheville’s most celebrated farm-to-table restaurants. Enjoy incredible local flavors, great wine, and even better company as we bring together healthcare marketing leaders attending CHPRMS to talk strategy, privacy-safe growth, and what’s next for the industry.
Healthcare marketers are being asked to do more with less. This webinar explores how industry leaders are navigating shrinking budgets, rising expectations, and rapid change. Alan Shoebridge of Providence and Suzanne Hendery of Renown Health share candid, practical strategies for leading teams, proving ROI, and unlocking new efficiencies without sacrificing impact. Watch to learn how to turn constraints into creativity and walk away with actionable tactics you can use right now.
Healthcare marketers have long been stuck between a rock and a hard place. They want to run smarter campaigns with better targeting—using tactics like lookalike modeling, retargeting, audience exclusions, and custom list uploads, but have been blocked by privacy concerns and complex compliance rules. Until now.
Fresh Content: Retail Marketing for Healthcare
For years, healthcare marketers treated the retail playbook like contraband. Personalization? Off-limits. Retargeting? Too risky. Sequential campaigns? Forget it.
But that’s changing. At House Call Chicago, Aaron Horowitz and Jennifer Hickman from Rise and Quad showed how healthcare teams are now safely running retail-inspired campaigns, including personalization, closed-loop measurement, and compliant retargeting.
Their message: patients are consumers. They expect seamless, personalized experiences like the ones they get from retailers. The difference is that, in healthcare, it all has to be powered by first-party data and privacy-first tools.
If you don't read anything else in this email, tune into this: With the right data infrastructure, healthcare marketers can finally use retail tactics safely. That means:
Closed-loop measurement tied to real revenue events
Smart, compliant retargeting (knowing when not to re-engage)
Cross-channel orchestration that keeps PHI protected
PS - Want to see how leading healthcare brands are already pulling this off? Join us at House Call Miami to hear their stories firsthand. Spots are limited—request your invite today.
Fresh Take: The Retail Shift
Mayura Kumar, VP of Digital Marketing Strategy at OSF HealthCare, says healthcare marketers are finally making real progress toward the retail model where the consumer always comes first. We finally have the technology. We still need the buy-in.
File this one under: Holy [insert your own expletive here].
Earlier this month, Willis-Knighton Medical Center settled its pixel lawsuit over the use of tracking tools on its website. But the fine isn't the shocking part.
This is:
"Willis-Knighton Medical Center has also agreed not to use 16 specified digital analytics tools on its website and patient portal for two years from the date of final approval of the settlement. The list includes Google DoubleClick, Google Ads, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, Pinterest, and The Trade Desk."
That just shut down their entire digital advertising stack in one motion. It's not just a marketing problem; it's jobs, campaigns, and performance all on the line.
I'm not trying to sound alarmist here, but this really is the nightmare scenario for healthcare marketers. The stakes couldn't be clearer.
