Cardinal Digital Marketing

If you’re running programmatic in one-off, siloed campaigns, you’re setting it up to fail.

That’s how we open the conversation in our latest episode of Ignite—and once you hear her make the case, it’s hard to argue with.

The pattern is familiar: short bursts, capped budgets, measured against search. Then you pull the plug when results don’t come fast enough.

The channel isn’t the problem. The setup is.

Without consistency and real investment, the algorithm has nothing to work with.

Lisa and Lauren walk through what it looks like to run programmatic as a system instead of a campaign. Watch the full episode to find out.

Quality signals are the number one unlock in paid media right now.

That’s straight from Scott part two of our 200th episode of Ignite, where Lauren sat down with our team of Flockstars to explore what’s changing in healthcare marketing this year.

Scott is direct: take a weak signal and tie it to a real business outcome, and performance changes completely. And not in a good way.

With ad platforms largely taking over manual campaign optimization, the algorithm is running the show now. So if you’re feeding it the wrong signals, you’re not giving it anything to work with.

Better inputs ➡️ Smarter algorithm ➡️ Better results.

The team covers a whole lot more in the full episode, exploring the trends reshaping healthcare marketing in 2026.

After 200 episodes, one thing is clear: some shifts in healthcare marketing are impossible to ignore.

For the first of a two-part special episode of Ignite, we take a step back to reflect on how the industry has evolved and where it’s heading next.

Across these couple of hundred conversations with marketers, a few patterns have emerged. Patients are making decisions differently. Expectations around performance and measurement have increased. And the path from awareness to action is no longer as predictable or linear as it once was.

That shift shows up in many ways.

One example is how organizations have historically relied on search to drive patient acquisition. It worked because it captured demand efficiently and consistently. But as markets have grown more competitive, that approach has started to show its limits.

By the time a patient searches for a provider or service, the decision is often already taking shape. Long before that moment, they’ve been forming opinions—who feels familiar, who they trust, and who makes the shortlist.

Search still plays an important role. It just can’t carry the full strategy anymore.

What we’re seeing now is a broader move toward approaches that reflect how patients actually move through the journey—from early awareness to final decision, across multiple touchpoints.

This is just one of the patterns that’s become clear over time, and one of the themes explored in this milestone episode.

Catch the full episode to hear more about the trends shaping healthcare marketing today.