Session Details

Breakout 1.2:

The Keys to a Successful Hospital Rebrand

Randy McDaniels, President, McDaniels Healthcare Marketing

• How to identify when it is time for a rebrand.
• Proper planning steps
• How to establish a brand steering committee
• Brand research process steps
• Brand development process and evaluation steps
• How to build a brand standards manual
• Brand launch and integration stages

Breakout 2.1:

New Rules of Privacy-First Marketing

Sophia Zey, Head of Marketing, Ours Privacy

In 2022, new HHS guidance triggered a “HIPAA-calypse,” forcing health systems to strip pixels and operate with limited analytics. Today, privacy-first tracking, CDPs, and consent-based architectures are restoring visibility and enabling compliant attribution. Learn how organizations are rebuilding performance insight and redefining digital growth strategy.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what can be interpreted as PHI in digital marketing
• Learn about commonly overlooked risks
• Learn new best practices for modern healthcare digital marketing

Breakout 2.2:

TBD

Breakout 3.1:

Lights, Camera… Meh? Creating a consistent video marketing strategy that actually performs.

Tony Gnau, Founder & Chief Storytelling Officer, T60 Health

You put the time and effort into producing a video. Maybe you even spent money on a production company. Then you were super excited to release the video, and... Thud. Okay. Maybe it performed... fine... but not what you were expecting. "All the industry stats tell me video is the best performing content, so why are MY results, meh?" Tony Gnau is a 3X Emmy-winner and author of the Amazon #1 Bestseller, "Lights, Camera, Impact." He'll get you thinking differently about video marketing, and he'll show you how to create a strategy built on consistency that won't break your budget. From awareness to conversion, he'll highlight the types of videos you should be producing, when to DIY, when to hire a pro, and the key to getting real results.

Learning Objectives

• Why some videos flop... even when the stats say they should work
• A simple framework for building a consistent video marketing strategy
• How to balance DIY and professional video production for the best ROI

Breakout 3.2:

Hug vs. Shake: The Missing Tension in Behavior Change Campaigns

Whit Thompson, Executive Creative Director, Insight Marketing

Healthcare marketers are asked to do something deceptively simple: get people to act. Get screened. Get moving. Get help. Get ahead of the risk. So, we do what we’ve been trained to do: educate, inform, and explain, assuming that will be enough to do the job. And then... nothing happens. Not because people don’t care. Not because they didn’t get the message. Because something is still in the way.

Over time, we’ve found that most behavior change campaigns fail for the same reason: they rely too heavily on a single approach – either comfort or confrontation. But real behavior change doesn’t come from one approach. It comes from the right tension between two. We call it Hug vs. Shake. A Hug tells someone they can do it. It builds confidence, lowers friction, and makes action feel possible. A Shake tells someone they need to do it. It creates urgency, clarifies consequence, and disrupts delay. Both are necessary. Most campaigns get the balance wrong.

Drawing from real-world public health campaigns, from chronic disease prevention to environmental risk and physical activity, this session will introduce a practical framework for identifying what’s actually stopping people from acting, and how to respond with the right message at the right time. Because the job isn’t to say more. It’s to remove what’s in the way.

Learning Objectives

• Identify the true barriers preventing people from acting (fear, low urgency, confusion, stigma, perceived difficulty, etc.) rather than relying on assumptions about awareness.
• Apply the Hug vs. Shake framework to determine when messaging should build confidence and when it should create urgency.
• Design more effective behavior change campaigns by aligning message tone with the specific barrier that needs to be removed.

Breakout 4.1:

Telling Your Talent Story: Practical Ways to Strengthen Recruiting

Maria Nelson, President, Red Shoes Inc.

Meagan Hardwick, Vice President, Red Shoes Inc.

Recruiting today is not just about filling open roles. It is about building relationships, communicating culture and telling a story that helps the right people see themselves in your organization. This session explores the growing overlap between recruitment and marketing, showing how both succeed by understanding audience needs, values and motivations. Attendees will learn how small, intentional adjustments to messaging can help organizations connect more effectively with emerging and evolving talent pools, including Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Rather than calling for a complete overhaul, this presentation offers practical, culture-aligned strategies that help organizations strengthen talent attraction in ways that feel authentic, achievable and sustainable. Participants will leave with a fresh perspective on recruiting and clear ideas they can apply right away.

Learning Objectives

• Recognize how recruitment and marketing increasingly work together to shape employer perception and attract the right talent in healthcare.
• Explore how thoughtful, audience-centered messaging can help healthcare organizations connect more meaningfully with emerging and evolving workforce segments.
• Identify practical, culture-aligned strategies to strengthen recruitment messaging in ways that feel authentic, sustainable and actionable across the organization.

Breakout 4.2:

TBD

Thursday, October 8

General Session:

Presentation Perfection

Emily Hartzog, President, Chartwell Agency

As communications professionals, it's sometimes taken for granted that we are - or should be - seasoned public speakers and charismatic orators. Our ability to stand in front of an audience and deliver a pitch, present an idea, or support our work is central to grow our organizations, advance our careers, and inspire our teams. Strong, effective presentation skills promote our ideas and inspire action. Developing presentation skills that wow any audience requires us to consistently hone our craft. Sometimes, we event provide coaching to others in our organization to deliver a message with the right tone and impact. 

In this session, we'll discuss the art and science at play for public speaking. We’ll explore how personality types impact presentation style. We'll talk through human information processing basics that impact how messages are received, as well as specific tips to use while crafting content for public speaking engagements. Finally, we'll walk attendees through ways to prepare for opportunities, connect with their audiences, and course correct if things start to go south. 

This session will improve the presentation game of even the most seasoned public speakers and provide specific tools that attendees can put to work for themselves or provide to others in their organization.

Learning Objectives

• Learn how personality type influences presentation skills. Introvert and extroverts bring unique assets to the sharing of information, yet our society tends to place value on charisma, an ability to exchange information "off the cuff" and engage audiences. Learn how to parlay natural strengths into presentation style.
• There's a science behind how human beings send and receive information, and the ability to capture and maintain an audience’s attention requires a basic understanding of it. Learn how we process information being delivered in a presentation and tools for crafting more effective content and supporting materials.
• So how do we deliver the goods? Preparation is the start of every great presentation, so we’ll walk through a checklist of steps to prepare for an effective presentation. We’ll also share specific tactics to better connect with audiences when delivering a presentation and ways to course-correct if you start to lose them.

Breakout 5.1

The seven deadly sins of healthcare marketing (and how to repent before your audience leaves you behind)

Shannon Cummins, VP, Client Growth, Unlock Health

Claire Winegar, Content Director, Unlock Health

Even the most well-intentioned healthcare marketers fall into patterns that quietly sabotage their own impact. In this provocative session, Shannon and Claire reframe common marketing pitfalls through the lens of the seven deadly sins. They offer a candid look at how campaigns get bloated, branding becomes self-congratulatory, and strategy starts to look a little too much like the system next door. 

This will be a conversation that’s unvarnished, fast-moving, and deeply human. With humor, honesty, and a shared passion for authentic marketing, Shannon and Claire will walk attendees through some of the most insidious traps marketing leaders fall into — not just in theory, but in practice. 

You’ll recognize the sins. Pride shows up when brands mistake internal alignment for public relevance. Lust emerges when teams chase every trend, platform, or persona. Envy tempts marketers to imitate prestige systems without asking whether the strategy fits their own audiences. And Gluttony? That’s when a campaign has 17 KPIs, 42 assets, and no unifying idea. 

These are painfully familiar behaviors, and they’re fixable. This session will challenge attendees to reexamine the assumptions behind their own campaigns and offer a practical framework to drive more focus, alignment, and audience trust. 

Come ready to laugh, squirm, and rethink everything from your brand strategy to your campaign briefs. If your marketing feels like it’s trying too hard, or doing too much, this session is your permission to stop, simplify, and reconnect with what really matters. Expect uncomfortable truths, bold insights, and a few live polls that will test just how guilty the room really is. And for those who stay until the end...a bonus sin awaits.

Learning Objectives

• Highlight some of the bad habits, acquired behaviors, and systemic missteps that contribute to some of the major issues in today’s healthcare marketing
• Help attendees learn not just how to avoid the sins, but how to turn them into healthcare marketing virtues
• Provide simple hacks and shortcuts to get more value out of your marketing spend...instantly

Breakout 5.2

Winning Off the Field: Leveraging Athletic Partnerships to Grow Market Preference

Sarah Kinkade, Strategic Marketing Director, OSF HealthCare

Health care organizations invest millions in sponsorships, yet many struggle to connect those investments to meaningful business outcomes. This presentation explores how OSF HealthCare transformed a traditional sponsorship into a strategic growth partnership through a five-year agreement with Illinois State University Athletics. Attendees will learn how OSF aligned clinical services, community presence and integrated marketing to strengthen brand preference in a competitive market. Through the partnership, OSF provided a sports medicine physician, athletic training support and funding for athletic program resources, while receiving year-round exposure through venue signage, athlete branding, social media, radio advertising and other marketing assets. The session will share how this comprehensive approach contributed to measurable increases in sports medicine and orthopedic preference within the Bloomington market, along with continued growth in orthopedic clinic utilization. Participants will gain practical insights into structuring mutually beneficial partnerships, identifying meaningful performance metrics and maximizing the value of sponsorship investments to drive both brand and business growth.

Breakout 6.1

Balancing content optimization and brand storytelling in the AI era

Kate Kallenberger, Senior Copywriter, Vendi Advertising

Patients aren’t just Googling anymore. They’re asking AI which doctor to see, which urgent care is closest, and which hospital they can trust. Increasingly, AI is answering those questions before a patient ever visits your website. 

For healthcare marketers, that shift has created a new wave of urgency around AI optimization, answer engine optimization (AEO), structured content and visibility in generative search. Those tactics matter. But in the rush to adapt, many organizations overlook the content that more meaningfully influences patient choice: the stories, voices and experiences that make a brand feel familiar and trustworthy. 

When AI surfaces multiple healthcare organizations side by side, patients are more likely to choose the one they already recognize, the one they’ve heard good things about, or the one that feels human. That trust is rarely built through technical optimization alone. It’s built over time through patient stories, rich provider profiles, community features, brand journalism, newsletters, podcasts, videos and consistent storytelling. 

This session is for healthcare marketers who know both things are true and are trying to figure out how to do them with a team that was already stretched before AI entered the picture. We’ll explore how you can balance both priorities: creating content that is discoverable in AI-driven search while also investing in the storytelling that makes an organization worth choosing in the first place.

Breakout 6.2

How Healthcare Website Teams Decide What Not to Build

Brad Muncs, CEO, Symetris

Healthcare website teams are rarely short on ideas. They are short on time, clarity, and the ability to say no without friction. 

Between leadership requests, compliance concerns, departmental priorities, and patient needs, many healthcare marketers end up maintaining bloated websites that are difficult to evolve and even harder to govern.

This session introduces a practical prioritization framework designed specifically for healthcare environments. One that helps teams evaluate requests, reduce unnecessary work, and protect patient value without becoming blockers. Drawing on patterns observed across health systems and hospital networks, this presentation focuses on how mature teams decide what not to build so they can move faster on what actually matters.

Learning Objectives

• Attendees will leave with a clearer way to evaluate incoming requests, communicate decisions with confidence, and reduce long-term website complexity.