How Compliance Fuels
High Performance Healthcare Marketing

Catch the Key Takeaways

In our recent webinar, Amsive, Freshpaint, and Priority Health tackled HIPAA-compliant performance marketing and built a roadmap for success.

In today’s privacy-first world, healthcare marketers face a growing challenge: how do you track and optimize your digital marketing when compliance risks threaten visibility at every turn? For Priority Health, the answer came through partnership and persistence—ultimately rebuilding their performance marketing capabilities from the ground up.

Here are the top five takeaways from the conversation:

Rebuild your performance strategy around HIPAA-compliant data

Marketing performance didn’t disappear — but traditional tracking methods did. Instead of relying on outdated tools, marketers must adopt privacy-first platforms that enable compliant data collection and campaign optimization.

This shift requires new measurement infrastructure, but the payoff is real-time visibility, restored attribution, and confident investment decisions. It’s not just about following the rules — it’s about building a future-ready foundation.

Bring compliance, legal, and finance to the table early

Getting compliant starts long before implementation. Legal, compliance, finance, procurement — they all have a stake in how member data is handled. Waiting to involve them slows everything down.

Instead, proactively engage key stakeholders early in the decision-making process. Outline risks, clarify goals, and present a business case grounded in performance impact. Early collaboration reduces roadblocks — and speeds up success.

Use data credibility to earn internal buy-in

Marketers who consistently use data to guide strategy are better positioned to lead change. When your peers see marketing as both creative and analytical, your initiatives carry more weight.

Showcase how data drives your media decisions, spotlight measurable wins, and translate marketing performance into business value. Trust in your process builds trust in your proposals — and unlocks investment.

Set a new performance baseline for privacy-first marketing

Old benchmarks don’t apply in a post-2022 world. Trying to compare today’s privacy-safe performance to pre-regulation metrics is a losing game.

Start fresh. Use your new tools and clean data streams to define a baseline that reflects the current landscape. Then, optimize from there — and demonstrate progress with clarity and confidence.

Choose partners who can align strategy, technology, and compliance.

Solving healthcare marketing challenges takes more than a new tool — it takes the right team. Look for agency and technology partners who understand HIPAA, move with urgency, and support every phase from buy-in to execution.

A trusted partner doesn’t just deliver implementation. They help you sell the vision, simplify the complex, and ensure your team — and your campaigns — are set up for long-term success.

Dive into the Transcript

Introduction

Craig Blake (00:08):

Welcome in. Everybody just waiting for everybody to jump on here before we get started. Alright, looks like everybody’s loaded in. Good afternoon everybody, and good morning for those of you on the West Coast. My name is Craig Blake here with Amsive, excited about our webinar today. So again, my name is Craig Blake, Healthcare Practice Lead here at Amsive, and I’ll be moderating today’s conversation with a great group of panelists, happen to get to know Josh and D.J. over the past several years and got to know ’em a little bit closer here as we prepared for this webinar. And I can tell you we’re going to be excited for what we’re going to share with you today.

Before we get started though, just a few quick housekeeping comments. First, should you have a question throughout our conversation today, there’s a q and a button, comments button down below on the Zoom navigation bar. Just go ahead and enter it there and we’ll get to those later on. And also, for those of you that want to share or revisit this conversation, we’ll be sending you all a recording following today’s call. So again, thanks again for joining us. Let’s meet our speakers.

First off, we have D.J. Willard, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing at Priority Health, and they’re a leading nonprofit benefits company in Michigan. Also, we have Josh Jacobsen, Senior Partner Manager at Freshpaint, and they’re a leading healthcare data focused platform.

And again, I’m from Amsive and we’re leading marketing performance agency. So I guess you’re asking yourselves, how did three guys like us get up on this stage together, get on the screen together for you today? Well, the story goes like this back few years ago, post 2022, and I’ll explain it a little bit why 2022 is such an important year in today’s conversation.

Following that date, priority Health and Amsive engaged in a relationship where we were supporting their a EP marketing. And at the conclusion of that first year, we started to look at performance of our digital campaigns and realized the really impact that the HIPAA compliance has had on overall performance reporting.

So over a period of time we worked in partnership with Priority Health, D.J. was instrumental part of that and discussed what are options to bring performance back to digital marketing. And through those conversations, Freshpaint entered the scene. Of course, priority Health did a thorough exhaustive search, but ended up working with and choosing to work with Freshpaint to help solve for this and really bring in a CDP or we like to call them privacy platforms in to go ahead and be able to bring performance back to digital marketing. So that’s kind of why we’re all here together.

We’re going to tell you a little bit about that story, a little bit about how D.J. was able to solve for this within his organization. And of course we’ll be sharing expertise from Josh and myself along the way. So before we get started, I think we all know there’s a lot of scrutiny around digital marketing these days and it’s had a major impact on our lives. I think some of us can say it’s had an impact on us personally and also professionally.

And today we’re going to really talk about the professional side of it, how it’s impacted us as marketers, how it’s made it more challenging for us to do our jobs, especially when you’re in healthcare, marketing, privacy regulations has really pulled away performance. So here’s a question. I think we’re all going to know the answer to this, but let’s put this poll question out here As a marketer, you can read it right here on your screen, but you’re not able to track the digital marketing anymore. You’re not able to do that the way you’d like to do it. So if you’ve ever seen that, just go ahead and answer that question.

The current state of compliance and healthcare digital marketing

Craig Blake (04:37): And of course I get the poll question too, so I’m going to answer it as well. Make that go away. So when the poll question gets answered here, we’ll give you a quick second. Go to figure that one out. Alright, everything tabulated now, I think as we’re all looking at this poll question, we know the answer to that. The answer is yes. We’ve all been told these things. We’ve told that healthcare marketing is challenging. Digital marketing is very hard and difficult. You can’t track things anymore. So I think we know the answer is a resounding yes. We’ve all been hearing that and as marketers, that’s frustrating, right? And it’s really no surprise that everybody’s facing. So here we go. Here’s the answers. So 45% Josh or D.J.. Any feedback to what you’re seeing there?

Joshua Jacobsen (04:37): It aligns with a lot of the conversations we’re having. A lot of folks are unsure of what they can track today given all the changes in regulations. And yeah, that’s a majority of the conversations I get to have on a daily basis.

D.J. Willard (04:52): Agreed. We ask ourselves this question nearly every day because the regulatory environment continues to shift and change. And so we need to be prepared for those changes. So in some cases we may not be able to track our marketing performance. In other cases we may, or maybe something just recently evolved and now we have to react to that. So it can be a situation where all of those may be true.

Key challenges for healthcare marketers

Craig Blake (05:20): Yeah, for sure. And it’s no surprise we’re all facing the same challenges. Some of those challenges are perceived and some of them are real, but as healthcare marketers, we’re really we’re facing and living through this challenge and tension every day. But the tension is just not singularly focused. It’s not just compliance. It runs across many different areas and different concerns. And you need to build a game plan that really touches on all five of these things.

One, you got to speak about compliance, you got to make sure you’re taking care of that. You got to make sure your solutions are addressing financial pressures and unfortunately, bringing in a privacy platform does cost money. And what does that look like with tightening budgets? What are the performance demands that you’re up against? How is this going to help you meet those performance or enhance these performance demands that we’re hearing from leadership?

We got to take a look at time to business and value expectations, and then what’s the durability and reliability of these solutions? All of these things need to be considered and addressed as you build out your game plan. Sometimes it’s easy when all these things and you’re trying to do your job and then all of a sudden you’ve got to deal with HIPAA compliance in your world. As a healthcare marketer, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and stuck, and our goal really is to help you get unstuck today and through our conversation, our goal is to give you a roadmap for success that if you are stuck and you need help, that will help you really elevate your game and bring performance back to digital marketing.

The evolution of healthcare privacy regulations

Craig Blake (07:31): So let’s kick things off with a little history, right? I think it’s always important to start at the beginning of when all this took place. I mentioned earlier on the year 2022, well Josh, who’s not a lawyer, but he will be, he’s going to play one on this webinar. He’s going to bring us through what has occurred throughout the past several years from 2022 until now to really give us a visualization of how the landscape has changed.

Now, I’ll tell you, if you’re multitasking during this webinar, this is the point you should stop and really pay attention. You have to get a good handle on what’s going on. So Josh, bring us up to speed. What’s been going on?

Joshua Jacobsen (07:31): Yeah, thanks Craig. Yeah, as you mentioned, I think before we jump into where we want to go today with the conversation, we want to quickly just walk through a few key points from regulators, legislators, class, actions, and really just the broader industry response that has shaped where we are today. Craig, you mentioned it. I’m not a lawyer, we’re not lawyers, but I think this will help frame the conversation as we go on.

So starting back in June of 2022, there was a major investigation by the markup that found many healthcare provider websites in the US were disclosing protected health information to Meta. Later in June of 2022, after that news broke a wave of class action lawsuits were filed against Meta, and then in December of 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services, along with the Office of Civil Rights, they issued a bulletin about web tracking technologies.

So they provided guidelines on risks. These tools pose and outlined what covered entities should or shouldn’t do when using them. So the bulletin divide, PHI as a combination of one health information. So think of something like a URL paired with an identifier. So it could be a device ID or an add click ID. So that’s where the compliance risk really begins when it comes to HIPAA. As you can see highlighted on the screens, the health information plus identifiers equals a potential HIPAA risk. We then see in March of 2023, the FDC find GoodRx and better help.

While these cases don’t fall under HIPAA directly, the FTC used older wire tapping and privacy laws to hold them accountable. So the core privacy risk here really remains the same. It is about tracking technologies, but we’re seeing the enforcement mechanism was different. So the takeaway here is that it’s not just the HHS acting anymore.

As you can see, it’s also the FTC as well, and we’ll get into some additional things later on as well. So a year later in March of 2024, the HHS actually updated its original bulletin to offer more clarity. So one of the key callouts in that update was if a healthcare organization can’t get a business associate agreement signed, which is often the case with platforms like a Facebook, a Google, or a Trade Desk, then a platform like Freshpaint is recognized as a viable and approved alternative to this solution. We then see in November of 2024, blue Cross Blue Shield’s federal employee program was sued for disclosing PHI to TikTok.

This case is still ongoing today and then in January of 2025. So getting into this year, meta implemented new restrictions on data from healthcare organizations within their ad platform. So while that means reduced functionality for advertisers, what’s really important here is that meta is actually shifting the liability away from themselves and towards healthcare organizations and payers.

In February of 2025, we saw the first lawsuit filed under Washington State’s, My Health, My Data Act. So this is a major step signaling that state level privacy laws are now being enforced alongside federal ones. So at this point we’re seeing activity from, like we mentioned before, the HHS, the FTC. We’re also now seeing state government stepping in. So all of this is bringing both penalties but also just public scrutiny to the space as well.

We did see last month, two things, April of 2025, Blue Cross Blue Shield of California publicly disclosed that they had sent PHI to Google Analytics and Google ads. So we will see where this leads, but it’s a significant development in terms of just industry transparency and risk overall. And then also in April of 2025, we did see a new president here as we saw class actions being filed under California Consumer Privacy Act without any data breach being involved here.

So previously all class actions typically require a data breach that’s no longer the case. So this suggests really a broader shift that we’re seeing, especially recently likely driven by what is the new federal administration. So encouraging states to take a more active role in enforcing consumer privacy protections. In this case specifically California is expanding what qualifies as grounds for legal action, especially in relation to just tracking technology. So I know that was a lot, but I wanted to highlight some of the many changes that have occurred over the last few years and really just highlight the minefield that healthcare markers are navigating and wanted to make sure you guys keep in mind. The big takeaway here is that constant change means you really do need to be proactive and informed as we’re sure to see additional changes come.

The real impact on healthcare marketing operations

Craig Blake (12:07): Yeah, Josh, thanks for taking us through that. I know there’s a lot of information on this slide, but I think it’s important just to know what we as marketers and specifically healthcare marketers need to be aware of to make sure we’re doing digital marketing in a compliant way. There are solutions that allow you to be safe and responsible with the member data and consumer data. So D.J., when we were talking and preparing content for this, you were really engaged about remembering where you were in 2022 when this all happened, and I’m sure there’s many people on the phone that are going to have similar stories. Bring us back. What was that like at Priority Health and what was it like for you to live through that?

D.J. Willard (12:46): Truthfully, it was an unforgettable day in my career in healthcare marketing. All of our trackers, our tags, our pixels in one day were basically rendered inoperable. We moved swiftly in response to what we were seeing in the changing regulatory environment and disabled, realistically anything associated with our digital media advertising that allowed us to understand how our media was performing. Without that information, we were flying blind.

We had no way to know if our marketing was effective any longer. In fact, even though we did all of that work in a single day, which by some account was a herculean task, that didn’t mean that we were done. There was still a significant amount of work to be done over this timeline. So just because we turned it off doesn’t mean, well, I guess we can’t track our marketing performance. We needed to start determining other ways that we might be able to understand whether or not our marketing dollars were effective and the options were very limited at the time, and we needed to find a solution that would help us understand if our marketing dollars were helping to meet our business objectives.

Understanding privacy platforms as a solution

Craig Blake (14:09): Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, it’s funny, I heard similar stories of people talking about what these problems were like what that day in their life was like, and I was at HMPS Orlando last week and they turned the phrase apocalypse taking apocalyptic stance in HIPAA and combining those two words, hard to say. I had to practice a lot to make sure I wouldn’t mess it up today. So I think that just underscores what everybody’s feeling, right? It was kind of an untenable time and it is just the reality of the world we’re living. But the good news is there’s solutions.

So Josh, for you, let’s frame up exactly what a privacy platform is, because there’s some folks on the webinar today that might not know or have heard about him and don’t really understand. So let’s level set on what’s the solve for all of this, the apocalypse that we’re facing, right?

Joshua Jacobsen (14:59): Yeah, absolutely. And D.J., yeah, thanks for sharing that. I mean, I know that’s 2022 when that conversation started, but we’re still having those conversations on a daily basis with a lot of folks and it can be intimidating, but that’s something that we’re specializing in helping with. So yeah, I wanted to walk through this slide today because I think it is a good example of how we’re going to approach this conversation and help support teams like D.J.

Starting before diving into a little bit more of the details, I do always like to point out we sign a business associate agreement. It’s something we include with all of our plans at no extra charge. But what we’re going to do first when setting our potential clients up for a privacy first approach is we’re going to take a look at their website or their app, and what we’re going to do is remove all the risky native tracking pixels and we’re actually going to replace ’em with our own Freshpaint tracking pixel.

So it’s going to allow us to do two things. One, collect that data, but it’s also going to remove all the potentially red signposts on the website. So outsiders looking in will not see potential trackers that could put you at risk. So once those trackers are out, your data actually flows to platforms like Google Analytics, Google Ads, or meta exclusively through our Freshpaint custom server-side connection. So meaning that you’ll no longer have to deal with client side trackers that might accidentally leak unintended data. I do like to note on this.

So in addition to integrating seamlessly with these tools, say like a Google ads, so we actually work with your existing campaigns from day one. So unlike some other generic CDP solutions in the market, there’s no need for you to reset your conversions. We want you to continue working with the tools that you already have set up and the ways that you like to work with them.

And then two other things more just ongoing as we’re going to help you make sure your privacy’s safe for the future and really separate from applying that governance to the data. As we recognize privacy compliance can span multiple teams as we’ll talk about more today. It can go from working with your agency to an IT team, to marketing to legal to compliance.

There’s a lot of teams involved in this conversation. So our event verification tool here, what it does is offers a clear data flow visualization. So all the stakeholders I mentioned basically can get full visibility, visibility to the data that’s being shared without engineers needing to come in and dig through that code. And then another piece I like to touch on, because we understand compliance, it’s not just going to stop at setup, right? It’s an ongoing thing.

As you can see from the timeline I talked about, we’ve seen changes in the last couple of weeks and that’s going to continue to develop. So we want you to be compliant tomorrow and next month and two years. Our web tracker monitor basically provides weekly reports on active trackers on your site, their risk levels as well as their locations. So we’re basically keeping you informed and protected ongoing as regulations change or maybe trackers on your site adapt as well.

Navigating internal stakeholders and partnerships

Craig Blake(17:51): Yeah, that’s great. Thanks for walking us through that, Josh. To really summarize what I’m hearing you say is this really sanitization and protection of client data is what we’re doing here, and then being able to report on it in a way that gets everybody comfortable across a variety of different work groups. Speaking of work groups, D.J., let’s go back to you now. You identified the problem, you realized you needed to do something to be able to bring performance back to digital marketing. It was easy, right? You just walked into someone’s office and says, Hey, we want to do this, sign this, right? It was easy as that,

D.J. Willard (18:26): Just as easy as that. I think they’re probably in the webinar right now and send everyone on their way because it’s just that simple. No, Josh actually spoke to it a little bit earlier and said that there are many teams involved, and though the title of the webinar says how compliance Feels High Performance, it is not just simply a compliance issue where if you are able to gain compliance alignment that you are done and you can move forward.

That’s not exactly the case. You may begin with compliance, but there are other key stakeholders likely within your organization that will also need to be part of the conversation to be able to bring on a privacy platform. So let’s start with compliance and some of the questions that they often ask as you interact with them. Most importantly, they want to know where does the data go?

Is it safe? Is it protected? Is it destroyed? How long do you keep it? These are important details that often require a certain level of subject matter expertise. So as you evaluate the individuals that you want to partner with to bring in a privacy platform, think about having a partner that can help you answer those types of specific details when having your conversation with compliance. But even in that conversation with compliance, you’re not done yet.

You still have to speak with finance because finance is going to want to know what is your business case? What is the rationale? What is the ROI that you can expect to have from the investment in a privacy platform? You’ll have to look at your previous data before all of your trackers and pixels went dark and understand that if you had that visibility again, what might it mean in terms of media efficiency or media effectiveness to help finance understand how that investment will pay out for the organization?

But you’re not done yet because Legal’s still going to have their questions as well. They’re going to want to know, well, who are you communicating with when you are utilizing a tool like this? Are you speaking with members? Are you speaking with a specific consumer target? Are you talking to agents? All of these individuals who your marketing communications team may be in contact with are something that legal will take into consideration because there may be certain regulations or laws that prohibit the way that you communicate with each of these individual audiences.

So they’re going to want to have information that relates to that. And then another group not to be outdone is procurement. So assuming that you are already good to go with compliance, finance and a contract still needs to be developed, signed, and executed, and procurement is going to want to know is there a visit associates agreement?

Will they uphold their service level agreement? Who is going to sign the statement of work? Now, all of this makes it appear like it’s a super linear process, and as much as I’d love to say that it is a super linear process, it is in fact not a super linear process, and it is one that is actually taking place all at the same time. You are speaking with each one of these groups concurrently to help keep them informed as you work toward bringing on a privacy platform.

That’s not to say that you couldn’t take it one piece at a time, but you’ll often find that there’s some overlap in those conversations. So you may find it helpful to bring in a task force of individuals from each of these groups to start to have the dialogue around what it is that you’re trying to accomplish from a marketing perspective to help deliver on business objectives.

Addressing misconceptions and building internal partnerships

Craig Blake (21:44): D.J., was there any major misconceptions that you were confronted with as you worked with some of these work groups? Because a lot of them, like your finance team, do they really know what HIPAA is? Talk us through what that was like. Right.

D.J. Willard (21:57): There’s a lot of misconception around marketing as a function within healthcare organizations and what it is that we try to do. Most people perceive marketing as being creative and communication. You write the letters that go to members, you develop the advertising that I see on my television and on billboards as I drive down the highway to our office.

Yes, in fact, we do do those things, but we are also very much driven by performance and data. And I think what surprised most of our partners within the organization is that we base our decision-making in data, and that is how it influences our ability to deliver on business objectives. And as we began to share that data and democratize that data across each of these individual groups, they began to understand that there really is a business need and a business case to bring on a privacy platform.

Craig Blake (22:51): Yeah, great. Great. Well said. Now, I’ve been paying attention to the number of participants on the Zoom call. I’m glad we’ve not had anybody drop as you went through all the different gates you had to pass through to bring this to bear at Priority Health. Now there’s a byproduct from this, right? We were talking about this earlier in the week, is as you’re talking with the different work groups, you’re interfacing with folks that don’t usually interface with marketing. So the silver lining from all this effort and work is you’ve built some new bridges in your organization, right?

D.J. Willard (23:25): That’s absolutely right. These have become some of my most valued partnerships that I now have within Priority Health, not just because we had a business objective in mind and the desire to bring on a privacy platform, but because they can be good partners across the entire marketing mix, they can evaluate our advertising, they can provide feedback so that we can be mindful of some of those other regulations that might be changing directly under our feet.

I can’t pretend to know all of those things, but they are much closer to that, and they can help inform us as we communicate with our partners, whether it be a creative agency, a media buying agency, strategic consultancy, so that they’re aware of some of the things that we need to react to from a marketing perspective as we make our plans for the year as we make our plans for AEP, they’ve become really part of an extended version of our marketing organization.

Craig Blake (24:27): That’s great. I love that positive perspective in the bonds that you’ve forged within your organization because that really just shows how in your company, in your health plan or health system, you can really build bridges for future effort work groups. Now, is it true that some can be bribed with chocolate chip cookies? I’ve heard that rumor floating around once in a while, they likely could be bribed with chocolate chip cookies.

D.J. Willard (24:51): I think your mileage may vary in your organization, but the investment made in building the relationships with each of these functions within the organization is one that will certainly pay off in the long term, particularly as you’re looking at technological solutions like this so that you can deliver better business results for the organization.

The role of technology partners in implementation

Craig Blake (25:18): Yeah, that’s great. Now, Josh, of course, D.J.’s not doing this alone, right? They’ve identified a partner at this point. They had identified Freshpaint. Walk us through how you guys lean in. What’s that like? Because you’re really the expert feeding a lot of content and information to D.J.

Joshua Jacobsen (25:34): Absolutely. Yeah. And what D.J. said is it’s not a new conversation for us. Often this is the case when talking to a lot of potential clients. They have to take this to different teams, and so we’re no strangers to building out and helping build business cases for what it looks like. What’s important to the procurement team, the legal finance teams. We’ll work with you guys to customize that. And Craig, I know you guys will as well at the Amsive team. I think that’s part of the amazing relationship with us at Freshpaint and a team like Amsive.

We want to make this easy for you and not hard, and D.J. obviously did this very, very well at priority. But basically from a process standpoint, oftentimes we’re handling that privacy first setup. We’re handling the BAAs, the SLAs, the compliance controls Amsive is coming in and helping ensure that the downstream marketing execution is fully optimized. So helping you throughout the whole conversation, but we’re going to help with a lot of that setup and the selling portion of it as well.

Setting new performance benchmarks

Craig Blake(26:31): Yeah, for sure. And that’s great. Yeah, it’s all about partnership, right? And it’s partners internally, partners externally to help move the ball down the field. Now, D.J., I know you’re in the early stages and you, you’re still formulating results, but give us a pulse check. Obviously the solution’s implemented. What are you seeing? What are you hearing?

D.J. Willard (26:52): Well, I think at this point we are building a new baseline, a new benchmark to which evaluate our data. I don’t think that it’s fair to compare our previous performance to our current performance. It’s not an apples to apples comparison. We can’t go back to 2020 or 2021, look at those performance marketing results compared to what we’re now seeing in our privacy platform and say, well, it’s underperforming or overperforming. In reality, we really don’t know.

So we are at this stage building our new benchmark by which we will evaluate the performance of our marketing. I’m encouraged because we actually see data now, which is what we hadn’t in years past, but it will take time. It will take time. It will take patience to be able to start to see the business impact as we’re able to optimize our campaigns now that we have this data available to us.

Craig Blake(27:48): Yeah, it’s interesting when you say it that way. I think about it as a marketer, we’ve all been doing this a while and think about tactics that we’re and technologies available in 2022 to what we have at our disposal 2025 AI wasn’t even in the conversation, or if it was, it was not what it is today for sure. So I think I love the phrase creating a new baseline, and I think that’s a great takeaway for all of our participants today, because that’s what you’re going to need to do, create that new baseline. You can’t compare old versus new.

It’s you got to create what’s happening today and what life is like today and what’s working today because it’s vastly different than what worked back in 2022, and that was only a few years ago. Right. Well, good. So Josh, give us a broader lens, right? We’ve got a slide here that shows a bunch of results. So kind of just top line what you’re seeing and what’s coming, some of the high level takeaways here.

Industry results and success stories

Joshua Jacobsen (28:46): Yeah, so as you can see on the screen, we wanted to just share a few helpful stats from some of our customers over the last couple of years. Like D.J. mentioned, priority Health is positioned to regain real-time marketing optimization capabilities today, but wanted to share a few others. As I know the audience here today may come from a mix of healthcare organizations. I’m not going to read through this like the previous slide and bore you guys. It’s been on here for a little bit, but wanted to pause and let you guys read that and just digest some of that. And if we do want to come back to it later, if you want to talk about it in the future, we can always dive into these results more.

Craig Blake(29:20): Yeah, Josh and I love that you have this up broken up by segments. When we were talking last week at HMPS in Orlando, my mind was opened up a little bit and how far reaching this is some of the medical device categories that you’re working in. I guess I should have known that it was going to apply there, but it does, and you got your different specialty groups and different organizations. It’s really, if you’re anywhere in healthcare, you need to make sure you’re communicating to consumers, especially through digital marketing in a compliant way.

Otherwise, as we saw on previous screens, it can get pretty ugly quick. Absolutely. And the great thing is marketers, if we can go ahead and have the results to say, Hey, here’s the return on investment based on actual information, not funny math, that allows us to ask for more budget dollars, ask for growth, ask for testing, all those things that drive us to get out of bed to be a great marketer every day. And it’s hard to do that when we don’t have the data. So that’s why I love it. I was going to create a bumper sticker following, it’s called bringing Performance back to digital marketing. It’s all about what we’re talking about. What’s that, Josh?

Joshua Jacobsen (30:30): I said that’s what it’s all about. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all about getting the data back on.

Key takeaways and final thoughts

Craig Blake (30:36): Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, and Amsive, we deal with that all day long, and it’s interesting across the different industries we play in, how all the rules are different and what we can and can’t do. But I’ll say healthcare is one of the ones that have some of the larger hurdles we have to jump over to be able to make sure we’re able to realize real performance based on information. So before we get to Q and A, we’re at about the halfway mark.

We did want to leave an ample amount of time for Q and A, kind of wanted to pivot and talk a little bit about some final thoughts. So Josh, you probably hit on this today already, but what’s one action you would recommend marketers to take that they’re not doing already? If you could give someone advice and you’re sitting there having sitting down with ’em, having a coffee or a cocktail, what would one thing you’d want to remember?

Joshua Jacobsen (31:30): Yeah, and I think you’re right. We’ve probably touched on it a few times, but I think it’s probably the most important point we’re trying to drive home today is that HIPAA and all the other regulations I talked about that are in the healthcare space, they don’t mean you can’t track anything. So don’t assume compliance means you’re stuck.

There are solutions and you do have to start that conversation internally and partner with teams that both understand the compliance portion of it as well as the performance. So I know myself, all the Freshpaint team, I know Craig, the Amsive team, we’re more than happy to help you with this process and build out business cases. But yeah, it doesn’t mean you can’t track. You can still perform well.

Craig Blake (32:10): Yeah, that’s great. Now, D.J., I’m going to ask you two questions because I know you can handle it, right? So what’s one action that marketers should be taking away from your experience today? And then the second half of that is what do you wish you knew that you learned after the fact?

D.J. Willard (32:28): Oh, good question. Excellent. So what I would offer to those attending the webinar today first is work toward building credibility in data-based paid media decision making. And I had referenced that a little bit earlier, but in my personal experience, having worked in healthcare marketing for several years now to many, it appears like it’s some kind of mystical art or maybe even something that has just driven purely by this objective or the know-how.

Because we have been doing marketing for decades and decades when in fact a majority of us are using data to influence the decision making for our marketing mix. So as I was soliciting privacy platforms and partners within our organization, it helped that I had already established a track record of using data to drive marketing decision making, and most individuals in the organization weren’t even aware that this type of data even existed.

They thought I was only arguing between the difference between the color green and the color blue in our advertising, when in fact there was much more to the story than that. Then as I leveraged that objectivity that came from the data, it made for a much stronger point of view delivering objective rationale that helped support our estimates on the return on investment that we would get from having a privacy platform within Priority Health. So find ways within your organization to gossip the success quantitatively of your marketing campaigns.

That credibility will help pave the path for you to bring a tool like this into your organizations and increase both the efficiency and hopefully effectiveness of your paid media investment. Now, to Craig’s other question which was, well, what do you wish you knew our partners? I perceived as the department of no, that every time I spoke with a different partner, the answer that I was going to get was No, no, no, and that this was a futile effort.

Why would I even bother to try? I might as well just accept my fate as a marketer and that I’m just not going to have visibility to this type of thing. But rather than take that approach, I felt that it was important that I understand their point of view and said, I want the same thing that you do. Rather than fight them on it and say, well, I need to expose the organization to a certain amount of risk so I can see my marketing.

I said, I understand that we want to protect our PHI and our I. That’s what I want to do in my marketing. Help me do that. And by just simply changing the conversation like that, it helped make it so much easier to collaborate with my partners in the organization.

Craig Blake (35:16) So just by positioning in a different way, you are able to achieve that way too.

D.J. Willard (35:25) Just simply positioning and saying, I understand what you want. Let me see if I can get that for you. It was really collaborating with them in a way that invited them into the work that we were doing. Not an effort where it’s like compliance does the compliance thing and marketing does the marketing thing that we were trying to do something together and having a vendor partner who could then help us have those conversations internally made a huge difference because there’s a technical aspect to this that we haven’t really addressed today, and we probably will in a future webinar, but there are some things that when it comes to implementation, that individuals within your organization will want to know and want to feel confident about.

So having a partner that can help you do that really well is important when evaluating, bringing a privacy platform into your organization.

Craig Blake (36:15): Yeah, it goes to the old phrase, you’re going to sell internally and sell externally your ideas to get where you want to go. And D.J., I knew you’re successful in convincing them. Being a father of five children, I know that you’ve had plenty of experience convincing and getting your ideas, ideas understood and integrated. So as we’re wrapping up today and move to Q and A, just a couple things to remember as we’re talking about, remember the history lesson because it’s important of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

I think that is having an understanding of that will help you with those internal conversations. Number two, keep in mind that you’re not in this alone. There’s a lot of organizations, a lot of people that have been doing this out there, other health plans, other health systems that have accomplished this in their organization. Find those folks and talk to them.

I’m sure they’d be happy to share their journey just as D.J. shared his today, because that just gives you the confidence and tips and maybe a few suggestions on how to best approach this. And three, leverage the experts out there. There’s wonderful agency partners, wonderful technology partners like Freshpaint that want to help you solve this. There is a solve. If someone’s telling you flat out, no, we’re not tracking, they’re not right, you can.

You just got to present it as D.J. mentioned in a way that makes sense and is compliant and three baked chocolate chip cookies because it may help you open a few doors with compliance and accounting. But with that, I think, Lee, we have a few questions I’ve seen pop up on my screen here. I’ll let you lead the way for those.

Q & A

Leih Boyden (37:44): Yes. Our first question is about Freshpaint. So folks are asking, does Freshpaint work in tandem with Google’s server-side tag manager? Is it different? They’re interested in a little more information about how that works?

Joshua Jacobsen (38:06):

Yeah, yeah, great question. So we have the capability of working in tandem Freshpaint is a solve for everything beyond Google. So we want to work with your entire marketing stack is the big differentiator there to support your analytics all the way to all your ad platforms, your DSPs. So happy to continue the conversation if that’s a tool you guys are utilizing today.

D.J. Willard (38:30):

Yeah, I think that’s a really important distinction, Josh, and that is across the entire digital marketing mix. There are certainly solutions out there available to you that you can isolate certain components or tactics within your mix where you’d be able to evaluate your performance. But what was important to us is that we were able to see the impact and influence of all of our digital marketing tactics. There are fewer solutions that are really able to do that, but if you’re looking to understand the actual performance of your marketing investment, it’s important to have that more holistic view of the world rather than focusing on exclusive tactics.

Now, I understand paid search likely for a majority of us, drives a significant amount of conversions, but that is only one part of the path to conversion. And so the greater visibility you have to all of those tactics, the more likely you’re going to be able to optimize your marketing mix to deliver the conversions that you’re seeking.

Craig Blake (39:35):

Yeah, I love that point of view. Great question, whoever asked that. Thanks for digging in. I think we all agreed we could probably do a whole technical deep dive. Maybe we’ll do that as part two if we get enough thumbs up at the end of this session.

Leih Boyden (39:47):

The next question is about how frequently health systems should audit their marketing practices for HIPAA compliance, and what should those audits generally include?

Craig Blake (39:59):

D.J., do you want to kind of take a stab at that from your point of view?

D.J. Willard (40:03):

Sure. We evaluate our HIPAA compliance annually across each one of our lines of business. So whether that’s Medicaid, individual Medicaid, or employer solutions to make sure that we are following compliance regulations and all laws associated with marketing and advertising. We evaluate those to ensure that not only is our marketing communication meeting the requirements, but that as we track the performance, we are also following within the guidelines that are provided to us.

There are multiple components to it. So it’s who is the audience, what is the message and how are you tracking it? And you want to make sure that you’re evaluating those at least on an annualized basis. And even more importantly, setting up processes or policies that can make sure that you’re adhering to those as you develop your capabilities in doing more sophisticated data analytics and using privacy platforms to evaluate your performance.

Craig Blake (41:07):

And D.J., just to build on that, sorry to cut you off, Josh, but who are you partnering with internally? I think that’d be a good part of that answer is who are your colleagues that you’re working with to accomplish this

D.J. Willard (41:18):

Corporate compliance? They have become very closely linked to the work that we do in marketing now, and we meet at least quarterly with them, if not more often, just to share as an inform to help make them aware of the things that we are doing. And often that will drive conversation so that they can help us anticipate we haven’t talked about that much, right?

Everything that we’ve talked about right now sounds very reactive. These are the laws, this is the HIPAA compliance, all of these things, all these barriers that are in way and we are reacting to them. We want to get out of that reactive mode and be more proactive and anticipate what we might need to change in order to ensure that our marketing is compliant. And so having that relationship with them and meeting on a regular frequency helps us do that so much better.

Craig Blake (42:17):

That’s great. Josh, you were going to jump in there. Sorry, I cut you off.

Joshua Jacobsen (42:20):

Oh, no problem. I thought that was great. I was just going to add from a technology standpoint and just making sure you’re on top of HIPAA and just other regulations that from a partnership standpoint, we want to be a part of that. I think I mentioned it before with our web tracker monitor tool. Part of that’s just to continuously scan your site. I know that’s one piece of the puzzle, but just to make sure if we do see potential violations or something that is of concern, we’ll help you just flag that. So just staying on top of that and yeah, we’re more than happy to be a partner there.

Craig Blake (42:50):

Yeah, you got to play a little offense here as well, right? To make sure we’re always staying ahead of the game. Leih, I think we’ve got maybe time for one or two more questions.

Leih Boyden (42:58):

Totally. So the next one is going to be around emerging marketing channels. So we’ve talked about paid media, but what are some other kind of compliance challenges coming up with social media, SMS, things like that, and how are you guys looking at those as well?

Craig Blake (43:19):

D.J. thoughts there? What are you guys thinking about considering?

D.J. Willard (43:23):

Yes. I think it’s probably too soon to say that we have all of the answers for some of these emerging channels. We are still learning, just like every other organization, on how we can ensure that we are following compliance, that we are following the laws and regulations associated with marketing. They are some of the more significant compliance challenges that we have. And that may mean that as the old adage goes, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?

And finding segments or components within these different platforms where we can actually have an impact and leverage a technology or a tool that allows us to track our performance to understand what the risks are. We’ll also do our own analysis of those risks as well to make sure that we’re protecting our members information. So we may try several different tactics across each of these, but they’re going to be very narrow and very focused so that we can limit the amount of impact something might have. And at the end of the day, from perspective, it is still digital marketing.

 So we have the ability that if something isn’t falling into compliance, that we can turn it off almost immediately, and that helps our partners feel more comfortable that if something we’re to fall through, we can turn it off and that we’ve focused on such a narrow target audience. The impact is really going to be much smaller than it would be if we were looking at millions and millions and millions of impressions.

Craig Blake (45:00):

Great. And Josh, from your standpoint, as you guys are looking at what’s coming down the road, how are you guys adapting to, I guess, twofold, evolving legislation and the new technologies that are keeping to be

Joshua Jacobsen (45:12):

Built? Yeah, I mean, more hats off to my team who’s staying on top of this and feeding me all the information. But we do as the compliance layer for many of our customers need to stay on top of this. So we’re constantly staying up to date on what’s changing with legislation and how does our product adapt to that. Most of our conversations with our clients, they can be nuanced.

Every compliance team has a level of how much they’re willing to basically allow from a tracking technology standpoint. But what we’ll do is we’ll provide our guidance, what we believe is right. We’re not lawyers at the end of the day, but we’ll stay on top of everything, give you what we think is the correct move, and then it is at the end of the day of the compliance team what they’re willing to allow. So yeah.

Craig Blake (45:58):

Yeah. That’s great. Leih, one more.

Leih Boyden (46:01):

Absolutely. Yes. So it’s a question around the timeline. How long did it take to get things stood up? How long did it take to get buy-in? If you’re right at the start of this journey?

Craig Blake (46:16):

It’s a great question. I’m just going to chime in first then D.J., I’d love to get your point of view, but we see clients at various stages of this type of an integration. So it depends. It depends on how stringent your compliance department is, how open they are to seeing stuff and doing change and adopting. It says, D.J. was mentioning earlier, how are you helping them turn nose into, let’s talk about it, but D.J. specifically at Priority Health, how long was this journey? I have a guess from my memory, but better than me.

D.J. Willard (46:54):

I mean, from the point where we were settling on our identified privacy platform to the point where we were able to implement, I would argue that it was at least six months, but the conversation started much earlier than that in identifying our business needs. What is it that we were trying to accomplish or achieve by having a privacy platform because these were going to be important inputs into developing the business case. Why do you need this and what are you trying to solve for? What is the business problem that you are solving for? And we had to have a very clear idea of what that was.

And it was not just, oh, we’d like to be able to track our marketing performance. Again, that was simply not going to be enough to convince our partners to support the work that we were trying to do. So it really took several months for us to identify what those specific business needs were, the business opportunities or problems we were trying to solve for before we even landed on the appropriate privacy platform to fulfill our needs, and then share how those things aligned with our partners inside the organization. So six months for sure in all of that, but probably even three months prior to that to make sure that we understood what our business needs were going to be.

Craig Blake (48:17):

Thanks for the honesty and transparency in that answer. I think that gives a lot of comfort and perspective to folks listening in that might want to tackle this themselves. Josh, any outliers there? You’re seeing it from my same seat, where you’re seeing a variety of different clients across a variety of different healthcare organizations. 6, 9, 12 months seems about accurate.

Joshua Jacobsen (48:40):

Honestly, that is probably on the longer end of it. From a technology standpoint, we can move really fast. I think maybe more relevant to D.J.’s experiences. There’s a lot of internal selling that needs to happen on occasion, and that’s what can drag out, and we’re happy to help with that conversation. But from a technology standpoint, generally we can move fast depending on the client’s capability, or excuse me, their setup and their complexity so that conversation can move.

We’ve seen clients move very, very fast. But again, there’s a lot of internal politics that sometimes are at play, and we’re happy to help move that. So it can be anywhere from a couple of weeks to, it could go into six, nine months depending on the internal, just conversations around compliance paperwork, what we need to set up.

Craig Blake (49:22):

Yeah, so it sounds like the internal conversation is the longer tail, the actual implementation of the privacy platform can be accelerated based on appetite and availability.

D.J. Willard (49:35):

Very reflective of our experience.

Craig Blake (49:37):

Yeah. Well, that’s great. Well, as we’re coming to the end of our time together, I just want to thank Josh and D.J. both for all their preparation and gathering their thoughts here. Thanks to the SIF team for organizing this event today. We do appreciate everybody’s time. We did not get to everybody’s questions. We apologize. If there’s specific things you would like to learn more about or hear more about, please reach out and we’ll make sure we connect with you individually.

As I mentioned before, a recording will be sent that you can share. Maybe send it to your compliance team, who knows. But we thank everybody’s for their time and wish you all a great rest of your day. Thanks.

Marketing is evolving at breakneck speed, and 2025 is set to redefine the game. Explore the five biggest digital marketing transformations for 2025 in our recent webinar, or let’s talk about how Amsive can help you future-proof your marketing strategy.