Last week, I asked for your marketing "goofs" -- the mistakes we all make as marketers because we're human. Since we've all been there, I pulled together a few of the best stories that came in (and don't worry, I stripped out the PHI from these so they'll remain anonymous):
"I once scheduled social posts across all our channels for a big campaign...but the way our scheduling software worked was that you couldn't see the image before it went live. Just the file name you attached. (This was old school social media scheduling). Anyway, as you'd expect, I grabbed the wrong file name. So for an entire afternoon, our brand proudly promoted a giant gray box that literally said 'INSERT HERO IMAGE HERE.'"
"I was in charge of our newsletter mailings and once sent a new product announcement to our entire 500k subscriber list where our CEO's name was misspelled in the body of the email. I didn't notice until readers started tweeting about it...while our CEO was on stage announcing the product at an industry event and I was sitting in the front row. I felt awful, but the copy had gone through several other people for proofreading, and the CEO was totally unbothered. Plus, it meant that people not only opened the newsletter, but read far enough into the copy to spot the error. So...a win, actually?"
"In my first ever marketing internship my boss asked me to proofread an email, which I "did", but I didn't double check the sending list. I wasn't the one who pressed go, but we emailed the entire database something that was totally irrelevant."
"I once launched a new webpage with the URL misspelled. But that's not the goof. I fixed the URL but the email team sent an email announcing the new page with the old URL..and I forgot to set up a 301 redirect. So literally hundreds of people were sent to a broken page before I realized and fixed it."
Let's all promise to go a little easier on ourselves next time we make a marketing mistake.
Anyway, let's get on with the rest of the newsletter. Here's what I've got for you this week:
New Partner Directory
Microsoft Ads as an Audiences destination
MIAMI!
Pharma's pixel problem
Chris Pace on the marketers' superpower
Kaisers' $47.5M problem
Jobs!
Let's go...
NEW: Partner Directory
The Freshpaint Partner Directory is live! It’s your one-stop shop to see who we work with and which companies our customers actually trust. Basically, Freshpaint’s version of the ol' Myspace top friends feature (but we're not limited to only 8 friends).
The directory gives customers a clear view of our partner ecosystem: who we collaborate with, why they’re trusted, and where they can turn for expert help. It’s designed to add context, build confidence, and make it easier for prospective customers to find the right partners to work with.
We've just added Microsoft Ads as a new Audiences destination. That means privacy-first, precise audience targeting beyond Google and Meta. We're talking about targeting across Bing, MSN, Outlook, and Windows. You've heard of Windows, right?
Audiences users will be able to:
Retarget deeper-funnel users
Build exclusion lists
Expand reach with lookalikes
Eliminate manual list uploads
Early Access starts now! Contact your Freshpaint account team for more info.
Upcoming Conference
We’re hosting something different in January and you should be there.
House Call MIAMI is invite-only and intentionally small. It’s where you’ll trade playbooks with leaders from OrthoCarolina, Teladoc Health, and EssilorLuxottica on how they’re measuring what works, proving value, and building marketing that actually drives growth. You’ll also get a sneak peek at what’s next from Freshpaint and trust us, you’ll want to hear about it first. Reserve your spot today.
When: January 14–16, 2026 Where: 1 Hotel South Beach Cost: For qualified attendees, Freshpaint covers travel, hotel, and the full event experience.
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: The Pixel Problem
Pharma and DTC health teams are getting pulled into the same pixel scrutiny as HIPAA-covered entities. Healthline’s $1.55M settlement and Amazon’s MHMD lawsuit make it clear: state laws now treat “consumer health information” broadly, and pixels often collect it without anyone realizing.
In our latest post, we break down the three biggest risks: hidden health data in URLs, pixels firing before consent, and platforms like Meta stripping signals they consider “health.” If you think you’re outside the blast radius, you’re probably not.
Kaiser Permanente just agreed to pay up to $47.5 million to settle litigation over its use of web trackers across its websites, patient portals, and mobile apps. 13.4 million people were affected, and stands as one of the largest tracker-related settlements in healthcare.
The lawsuits argued that Kaiser’s tracking tools sent personal and health-related data to platforms like Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and X. Kaiser denies wrongdoing, but after years of litigation and mounting state-level claims, it chose to settle rather than fight it out in court.
The legal exposure isn’t theoretical anymore. Plaintiffs’ attorneys, state AGs, the FTC, and OCR are all aligned on one thing: PHI-adjacent behavior tracking are high-risk territory. If your martech stack hasn’t been fully audited and locked down, now’s a good time.
