In this engaging conversation On Health Biz Talk, host Tony Trenkle, former CMS CIO and health IT industry leader, sits down with Larry Kaiser, CMO of Optimum Healthcare IT, to explore how healthcare marketing has evolved from print media to LinkedIn-driven advocacy and podcast storytelling. Larry emphasises that relationships — not cold outreach — drive partnerships and client growth, and warns that replacing human creativity with AI automation is a strategic mistake no marketer can afford.
00:00:00 Intro
Welcome to Health Biz Talk, the industry’s leading podcast that brings you today’s top innovators and leading voices in healthcare technology, business and policy. And here’s your host, Tony Trenkle, former CMS, CIO and health IT industry leader.
00:00:12 Tony
Hi, I’m pleased to welcome Larry Kaiser. Larry is the Chief Marketing Officer for Optimum Healthcare IT and he is an award winning Healthcare IT Marketing Executive with over 20 years of experience leading high impact integrated marketing strategies that drive growth and brand differentiation. A recognised thought leader and speaker, Larry serves as host of Optimum Healthcare it’s podcast Visionary Voices. Industry recognition includes the 2020 Sway Health Healthcare Marketing Person of the Year, the top 10 most influential CMOs to follow, 2023 and an Oncon top 50 marketeer. So I want to welcome you to the podcast Larry.
00:01:04 Larry
Thanks for having me Tony. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today.
00:01:07 Tony
Great. Well we, we get a lot of different people on the podcast but we don’t often get someone who’s got the marketing background that you do. So it’s going to be exciting for me today to kind of probe some of the areas of marketing and get your thoughts about where marketing is, has been in your career and how things have changed. So I wanted to start off by asking you a little bit more about your how did you get to where you’re at today? What kind of background, interests or major career decisions did you make along the way to get to where you are currently?
00:01:42 Larry
Sure. So I, I’ve been in healthcare about 22 years now and honestly I kind of fell into it, you know. You know, when I graduated college in the late 90s, my first job was selling yellow page advertising, probably hands down the worst job I’ve ever had in my life. And then I got into the call centre space with an organisation that pioneered the recording of phone calls in the call centre.
And you know, I started in, in the help desk and learned and started writing tech tips and then became a project manager and I finally got into marketing and then you know, country had, you know, some economy issues and was laid off, bounced around to a couple of places and then you know, around 2005ish, I accepted a position at a company called Keen, which at the time was about a million dollar services industry type of company and had a small little healthcare technologies division which is what I joined as an RFP manager and 22 years later here I am as a chief Marketing officer for Optimum Healthcare IT, which ironically almost didn’t happen because in 2007 I decided that the grass was greener on the other side.
And I left healthcare for a very brief moment, took a job in New York City working for a company called Marsh McLennan. I’m sure you’ve heard of them, and team wanted me back and I decided it really wasn’t the greatest time to, you know, stay where I was. So I went back and I’m very glad I did because I have a very successful career in healthcare because of that. So that was probably one of my bigger career decisions, actually, going back to Keen after being gone for about four months. So.
00:03:28 Tony
Great. Well, sounds like you’ve had quite a journey and you’ve certainly been successful along that journey. So let’s move a little bit further into the marketing area and really curious as to where you’ve seen some changes occur and what you see today in a couple key areas. One is brand awareness, then brand differentiation and lead generation. All these are somewhat tied together, but they’re a little bit different in strategy and approach. So why don’t we start with brand awareness? What do you think are the most effective ways today to maximise that?
00:04:06 Larry
Sure, you know. Well, I think first and foremost, you know, if you go back to when I started in health care, like I said in early 2005, to where we are today, you have social media. It’s probably one of the more large, more influential type of technology that came around to really help with brand awareness. You know, first you had the Facebook and then you had, you know, Twitter and you had LinkedIn came out of that and so forth.
So that’s probably one of the bigger pieces from a brand awareness perspective, coming from where I came from back then to where I am now is becoming, you know, more present online and using the online presence to promote yourself, right? Your logo, who you are, what you do and so forth. So I think that really is probably one of the bigger technological advances in the last 20 some odd years to promote your. Your brand. And then, of course, a lot of strategies come from that. But from where I started to where I am now, I would say that’s probably the most important piece right there.
And then, of course, differentiation, well, that’s a whole nother storey because you’re using the tool, which of course was social at the time, you still had print media in healthcare, which was a necessary evil. Right? Because in healthcare we probably had somewhere around 15 or 20 different books you could be in, owned by any number of different places that would either joined now or becomes strictly online. So you had the print way to differentiate yourself. You had the social media way to differentiate yourself. And then industry trade shows were how. You, of course, were in front of everybody, really.
There’s no paper, there’s no screen in front of you and you had to demonstrate and actually take your brand and turn it in from a, you know, a flat piece of paper to a 3D dimensional type of booth to demonstrate yourself. I think when you look at that evolution, you can see how brands have gone across the board and have done that to where you are today, where, you know, probably the most important social media tool is LinkedIn. From a business perspective, right? Everybody’s on LinkedIn because you’re telling people first, you can come work for us, you can promote yourself, you promote your people.
People are tagging themselves and saying, I work here. Right. We have to verify they work here now on social media to. Back then, it’s like you were just wearing a logo on your shirt. So today it’s more about the people who are promoting your brand and your clients who promote your brand more so than a marketer promoting the brand. Because in most cases, as I’m marketing to my target audience, they could care less what I say or what I do. It’s what. How my clients talk about me. Right? It’s that advocacy is what you want now. And that’s really. The big differentiator is becoming a true vendor partner, with partner being the key word, getting the advocacy from your clients to help you do better in business and in the market. So I think that’s kind of that evolution has, how that’s flown through.
00:07:14 Tony
People have different ways they get that advocacy. Some people put quotes up on their website, some people do it through other means. How do you leverage that advocacy the best?
00:07:26 Larry
You know, probably a little bit of. A little bit of everything. You know, we have a quote section on our website. Several years ago, we implemented Testimonial Tuesday on LinkedIn. So we’re pulling quotes. So in our case from, you know, class. Research is the big research arm in healthcare and we’re constantly getting reviews from our clients there. So we pull those quotes, which we were allowed to do, they are anonymous and we create little graphics and put those on there. And like we call Testimonial Tuesday, or if we’re publishing a case study, we’ll pull those quotes as well. Also participate in Testimonial Tuesday there.
And then historically we’ve done some videos in the past, if they’re allowed. Right. The challenge is, is that a lot of organisations that we work with or just really any healthcare organisation has limitations on what their people can say or do to show favouritism towards a vendor. So a lot of times they may be anonymous and in some cases if the organ, depending how the organisation goes there, they allow their executives to talk on your behalf. So we do a little bit of everything. You know, like I said, we believe in what the Visionary Voices podcast, for example, that we, we started doing last year, we don’t actually talk about Optimum, we talk about our clients and amplifying their voices and by them just being on there. It also helps our brand without even talking about anything that we did just because we have them on our podcast. So I think we find different ways to get that advocacy out to the world on social media, in one way, shape or form, or on our website.
00:09:07 Tony
Yeah, I’ve noticed that’s a trend in some ways that people use the podcast the way you use Ubers and bringing on clients to talk about the work, which is kind of, I guess we call it soft marketing in some ways. I see the same stuff. For years, conferences like HIMS would have certain types of panels that would be led by an industry person who would get clients on there who would, you know, would certainly talk about what happened in terms of their business improvements, but not directly, you know.
00:09:40 Larry
Yeah, I mean, we do that too. You know, at Vive this past year, you know, we had a. A panel that was led by Chime and we had one of our executives and we had clients on it and we were talking about an overarching topic that we help both of those clients do. And our executive is more speaking on the industry level of it. The clients are talking about the experience and the best practises, the do’s, the don’ts, and that’s when they bring up the work that we did for them that helps us along the way there as well. So there’s a lot of different, a lot of different ways you can do it, whether very subtly or very in someone’s face, but you have to be creative because there’s a lot of barriers to get that advocacy these days.
00:10:30 Tony
And I guess one of the bigger changes that’s occurred in the past number of years is there’s so many channels to get that information out to now. So people’s ability to focus on a couple channels is, is a lot different today than it was even a few years ago. So I now have the same problem myself. So you put something out there, but you’ve almost got to use multiple approaches, as you said, because the fact that we just have so many ways that people receive information now.
00:11:01 Larry
Yeah, I mean, you have so many, like, I mean, how many different social media pieces are out there? Right? And you have to choose which one makes the most sense for you to publish your business content. You know, like we, we use LinkedIn almost exclusively for all of our content. We’ll occasionally post some stuff on Facebook or Instagram, but we really use those platforms more for employee engagement or things about employee of the month, employee of the quarter, you know, and industry awards and so forth.
But we’ll occasionally drop some content on those. We don’t use, you know, x any longer. And you have, now you have Blue sky coming up. You have threads coming up. Right. There’s T. Tick tock. And personally, I don’t find TikTok works in a business perspective. People use it. I personally would never put business content on TikTok. And then when we do video, we will put the videos on Instagram because that’s some of the video platform. But we, we have to find different and creative ways in all the different channels because people’s attention spans are so short.
00:12:07 Tony
Right, right.
00:12:07 Larry
You know, like even, like, if I was recording a podcast with you right now and I asked you a question and you came out with this brilliant answer, I might have my creative director just take that little snippet. Could be 5, 10, 20 seconds long. And we use that as a way to promote what we’re talking about on LinkedIn, to promote our podcast. So you’re never really posting the full thing. You’re just taking snippets and so forth, and you’re keeping that attention span, which is about 20 to 30 seconds most of the time, for instant social media kind of piece. And then, you know, if someone wants to download your podcast, of course they’re going to listen for however long they want to. That’s why we both, we don’t. We do video and we do audio on the podcast because people ingest their content different ways. So you want to make sure that you offer the full. The full platter of it and you can ingest it however you want to as long as you’re ingesting it.
00:13:07 Tony
Right. So is there a role for white papers? I mean, when I worked in the, in the government, I never liked getting white papers because I found they were, to me, they were thinly disguised marketing pieces. But your thoughts with it?
00:13:20 Larry
White paper definitely are thinly disguised marketing pieces. Right. I’m putting something out there, and in most cases, you’re gating a white paper, you’re asking someone to give you Their contact information to, to download it. And there are tools out there in the marketing space now where you can put something up without gating it and still collect the information. But ultimately it’s still a very common practise. We do it as well. We probably maybe do anywhere between three to five white papers a year. Like we just did a survey at the end of last year and we’re doing a white paper. So it’s actually our own collected data that we’re putting a white paper together for, which is more effective when it comes to collecting leads for that than, you know, doing something else, a type of a white paper. Right, but yeah, you mean you’re trying to get leads from. That’s, that’s, that’s the purpose. Give me your information. So for every, you know, Larry Kaiser, I get as. Give me his information, I get a Mickey Mouse.
00:14:20 Tony
Right.
00:14:20 Larry
You got to sort through the noise a little bit. But they do generate leads once in a while. But a lot of times, again, it’s just content up there to show what you know, you know, demonstrate your knowledge and want people to engage in it in different ways.
00:14:35 Tony
Yeah, it’s kind of a combination of thought leadership and lead generation. So it shows that you kind of know what you’re talking about, but at the same time you’re getting it out there and the people who respond to it, even if they make up a name, as you said, that’s common, but at least you’re, you’re getting a good feel for how much interest it’s drawn and things of that sort.
00:14:55 Larry
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
00:14:57 Tony
So I’m going to move to a different topic now, Larry. One of the ways companies like yours succeed is through technology partners. And I know looking at your website and Talking to you, ServiceNow has been an important part of your success. And I guess like to kind of have you talk a little bit more about that, how you manage a partnership, whether it’s with a large company like ServiceNow or a smaller technology company. Is it mostly done from a technical standpoint, a business standpoint, a hybrid? What’s your, what’s your approach? And we don’t have to use ServiceNow as an example. We can just use in general, how do you approach a new technology partner as opposed to maybe more established one?
00:15:48 Larry
Yeah, I mean, very good question, you know, and partnerships are key. And as a, you know, professional services firm at Optimum Healthcare, it is where we work with, you know, EHR services, we work with, you know, digital transformation services, where you have to have those partnerships, whether it’s ServiceNow or AWS or Microsoft or Workday, for example, you know, so first and foremost it’s relationships, right? You want to develop a good relationship with that partner.
So, of course that’s the business side, right? Then there’s. And that can also lead to, you know, business opportunity where you want to be able to say to that partner, we know your stuff really well. We have expert staff that know how to implement that. We know how to build, we know how to, you know, build the widget. We can do whatever you guys sell, we know how to take care of that. So then you say, okay, well, I’m going to educate your team on what we can do and I really want to work with you to your sales executives. Bring my sales executives in when there’s an opportunity that arises. Because just because a service provider or any kind of partnership, just because they sell a product doesn’t mean they actually implement it.
So they need firms like ours to do that. So from a ServiceNow perspective, like you mentioned, you know, we just won an award where the, the first time, the first time vendor has won the overall global health care Partner of the year award with ServiceNow two years in a row. And we have an amazing relationship their sales executives to our sales executives. So if we are in a provider organisation doing some EHR services, for example, and we hear about a ServiceNow opportunity, we pass it along to them and they can go in and potentially make the sale and then in return they bring us back to us and we implement it or build it or whatever they’re looking for in that space. If you look at a partner like AWS or Microsoft, we’ve become top tier partners with both of them where we have positioned ourselves to really be that, go to vendor to bring EPIC into the cloud from an EHR perspective.
So it’s a little bit of everything. It’s the executive level, it’s the sales level, it’s the technical level. And it takes an army to maintain relationships with vendors like that. Even back when I was working at Keen, which later on got acquired by NTT Data, my little division that sold the ehr, right, we didn’t do everything. We had a partner for general accounting and all the ERP pieces right there, we had a partner for documentation, we had an interface engine partner that we worked with. So each year when I put together our client conference, and this is coming from a vendor that sold in ehr, I would invite those vendors to become sponsors of my conference. Ultimately they’re financially supporting that. And then my clients come in and they get presentations from that or they meet with people and so forth. So when you look at optimum being on the services side, we don’t sell a widget, we ultimately sell people in the grand scheme of things, right.
But we have the expertise with, you know, the electronic health record vendors, Epic and Oracle, Cerner and Meditech, with the digital transformation partners of ServiceNow and Workday and Cloud, where we have managed to build those relationships up because healthcare, it is a relationship driven market. So you’re not just needing to build relationships with the executives and the hospitals, but also the providers of other pieces of software that they bring in. Especially in a time now where platforming is the big thing in healthcare, where if you can’t service or provide services around probably the three bigger platforms of the EHR, the ERP and the Ticketing or ServiceNow service desk type of stuff, you’re doing yourself a major disservice and your client a major disservice because you can’t provide them. You can’t provide them everything that they need. So those relationships are beyond important, right?
00:20:10 Tony
Absolutely, yeah. And I think a lot of companies don’t do that type of diligence that you are doing. And that’s when the technology companies get frustrated because they have other partners they can go to and when they don’t see someone they can depend on, it’s easy for them to move to another company just to, to give them more of their business or more of their, their time and, and they’re better technical.
00:20:37 Larry
It goes back to what I said earlier, right? It’s the difference between being just a vendor or being a partner.
00:20:44 Tony
Right? Right.
00:20:44 Larry
That’s the delineation right there.
00:20:47 Tony
So what do you think from a technology partner standpoint? What do you think they’re looking for with a company like yourself? Or what do you think that you shine where others, you think it’s more the relationship, your results, your, your ability to bring in new customers. What’s, what are your, what from their, your standpoint? What are you selling to them or what do they see that they would, I would say is probably the better way?
00:21:12 Larry
I think it’s a combination of everything, right. Because in order to continue to get new customers, you have to be successful with your current customers, right? So if you look, you know, in healthcare, right, we have, we have class. Let’s use class research as an example. Class research collects anonym reviews of the work that the vendors do. The vendors are ranked based on those views and because CIO or whomever in the Healthcare organisation does to review they get access to the system.
00:21:43 Tony
Right?
00:21:43 Larry
So you know, we hear all the time we chose you because you were the highest ranked vendor in category A, Right. I spend an insane amount of time working with class and working with our clients to make sure, working with our sales team to get all the information I need to send to Class so we can as many of our clients talking to them as possible. Because again, going back to what I said earlier for the advocacy, sometimes they won’t speak to an organisation such as clas, even though it’s anonymous, because they cannot show favouritism to one vendor or the other. So, you know, we do a lot of work to make sure that CLASS speaks to as many clients as possible.
00:22:22 Tony
Right?
00:22:22 Larry
So now I’m coming forward and saying, hey, not only have I built an excellent relationship with you, but I have the advocacy of other CIOs that you can reach out to. Here are then some results from a industry analyst that’s collected and published the success that we’ve had. So you hit the trifecta right there. You’re doing great. Oh, and also we can, also we can do A, we can do B, we can do C, we can do D, then you’re setting yourself up for success across the board.
And again, but the whole piece there, relationship number one, hands down, is the most important thing in this industry. And you know, there are several people in our organisation that are fantastic networkers who make it a point to build a relationship. It’s not just a one way, right? A relationship is a bi directional type of thing. Just because you are, you get to LinkedIn with somebody, doesn’t mean all of a sudden you have a great relationship. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve met a hospital cio, whether it’s at one of our events or an industry event. And I introduce myself as the Chief Marketing Officer at Optum Healthcare it. If there’s anything I can ever do for you, here’s my business card, here’s my cell phone. Please reach out and I’m happy to get you in contact with whomever you need to be in contact with or make an introduction to somebody else. And it may take many, many times of doing stuff like that before that person comes to you and says, hey, I need your help. Or you help them once and then they come back and they’re happy to help you, right?
But if you’re not doing that, these, a lot of these vendors out there, or the, the salespeople or the executives that don’t make that effort, you’re not going to be as successful as the firms or the people who do do that. And thankfully, you know, you know, I spent many years working in the service industry, you know, when I was in college and that job, working in the service industry, waiting tables, being a host, being a store manager, that really laid the groundwork in my late teens, early 20s for me to be successful in my 30s and my 40s, and this year, getting into 50, where, you know, I have the ability to really network and listen and provide service, not just as, hey, I’m your vendor partner, I’m just someone in the industry, you know, and I can make introductions, I can help you and I’m willing to help you because I know how important those relationships can be down the road.
00:25:00 Tony
Right. And I’m going to slide into client relationships in a minute. But I want to add one other question for you on the technology partnerships. In terms of relationships. I know in the technology industry people change jobs all the time, so one day your technology partner is, is an executive at ServiceNow and then they move on to some other industry. Well, I guess related, related type of company. What do you do in those types of situations?
00:25:34 Larry
Well, you know, I’ve. I’ve been on record on a few different podcasts or articles, whatever. Healthcare it is somewhat very incestuous, where everybody knows everybody, right? And if you move, if you do well in one role and you move to a similar role or a different company, depending on where you are, whether you work for a provider organisation, whether you work for a services company or whether you work for a software company, if you get known and people appreciate you and understand that, again, that relationship aspect, they’re going to follow you, right? You know, they always use them, you know, do you have a Rolodex? Right? That’s the, the old school term.
Now it’s, you know, what’s your contact list look like on your phone? But if someone trusts you at one job, technology vendor, and you go to a different technology vendor, more than likely that person, because they trusted you at one, will trust you at the other. If they didn’t trust you, they may ignore your call next time around when you say, hey, I moved from here to here. So you look at something like optimum, right? In healthcare, it, professional services and it’s intertwined and everybody knows everybody and if you make that one mistake that one organisation didn’t like or something, everybody knows about it and you’ll have a little trouble, that’s for sure. But you gotta be careful Sometimes what you say, what you do, you never burn a bridge, never ever burn a bridge.
00:26:58 Tony
Right.
00:26:58 Larry
Because you never know when you’re gonna need to cross that bridge again. And especially in this industry because for being a multi billion dollar industry, it is actually quite niche and everybody knows everybody.
00:27:10 Tony
That’s a small town. You’re right, yeah. So moving to the client side, what’s your client approach and what have your. I’m assuming you’re going to say the same thing about relationships, but even, even beyond relationships, you’re trying to get into a new provider’s space. What’s the first thing you’re going to do if you don’t know anybody there? I guess try to meet people. But what, what else do you try to do?
00:27:37 Larry
You reach out to your network, you know, and I think that that’s the first thing I personally would do. Right. Because if you think about it, we’re in a B2B world, right? Health care, really any most professional organisations, markets, industries are B2B. But what a lot of people don’t realise, that’s also B2C because not only are you selling to an organisation, you’re selling to an individual who has to sell you to their organisation. So you have to be very specific on how you market yourself, market your company, who you’re marketing to.
So if there’s, you know, if I’m well established at hospital A, and I know that, you know, that particular contact I have there is good friends with the executive at another hospital I’m trying to get into, I have, I have to have a level of comfort to ask for that introduction because that person won a good relationship, I’ve provided a good service for him or my company has provided a good service for him, we have a good relationship. We’re considered to not just be a vendor, we are a partner, then that individual really does not have any issue in making an introduction because they trust me as an individual to put their reputation of introducing me to somebody else, but they also trust my company and the work that we did to that other person as well.
Because whenever someone makes introduction, it’s their reputation on the line. If you did, if you do them wrong, then that person comes back and said, I can’t believe you introduced me to that person, that company, they completely screwed up this work and so forth, right? So trust, if you, if a person trusts you, they will make that introduction. That’s the number one first thing I would do.
00:29:27 Tony
And I guess in that regard companies like ServiceNow are probably very helpful to you as you’re trying to get it to a new client if they already have relationships with them.
00:29:37 Larry
Exactly.
00:29:37 Tony
Because of the trust factor.
00:29:39 Larry
Yeah. I mean, again, everybody knows everybody. So if, if, you know, I’m sure if one of our sales reps is Talking to their ServiceNow sales rep and they say, hey, do you know so and so over here? I happen to do. Yep. I met him years ago. Him or her years ago when I worked at Company A. Let me make the introduction for you. They’re only doing that because they trust me or trust our sales rep. Right. But yeah, every single partner you have. So you’re talking about your, your provider organisations that we work with. Again, we work so hard as an organisation to make sure that we’re considered a partner, not a vendor. And then every single partnership we have with other organisations, ServiceNow, Workday, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we work so hard to make sure those relationships are good so we can get those introductions. Because getting an introduction is a hell of a lot easier than sending a cold email or a cold LinkedIn request or, you know, God forbid, a cold text message to somebody which no one ever wants. Right. So, yeah, it’s important. They’re very important. I know I keep saying it, but that whole partnership piece and the in the networking and making yourself available to everybody is, is key to being successful.
00:30:54 Tony
Well, I can tell you, as being a former customer, the cold emails and cold calls were never something I liked. Generally be certain times of the day that weren’t times when I wanted to get calls from vendors.
00:31:10 Larry
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about technology. Right, so you know your iPhone has a brand new function from a couple of releases ago where you can turn it on. It says if this phone number is not in your phone, the iPhone will screen it and say, you know, please state who you are when the purpose of your call and I’ll see if this person’s available. So yesterday I was working at my desk and my phone rings and it’s a number that I don’t. My phone and the person recorded, best salesperson on the planet. And I immediately hit decline. Not more than 15 seconds later, he calls me again. This time, when the phone asks him who he is, it says, I believe in second chances. I get the client in. So then probably five minutes later, I get a LinkedIn request from the same guy that says, those darn iPhone screeners. How about a third chance question mark? And I block it. So what happens today? He calls me today, but this time his caller ID shows and he actually does his whole name and says. He basically said, please answer the phone and give me a chance. At that point, I blocked his number.
00:32:30 Tony
Right.
00:32:30 Larry
So I mean exactly what you said. Right. I don’t want to get the unsolicited phone calls or the LinkedIn request with just, you know, just link into you and then the minute you accept it, they try selling you something.
00:32:44 Tony
Well, the other thing they do with LinkedIn is they, they, they look at your contacts because they use them as a, as a, as an ability to go out and get new leads. I’ve, I, I recognise that, you know, when I get, people get requests, give me requests on LinkedIn, so, so I,.
00:32:59 Larry
I have a very unique. LinkedIn call it what you will filter in place if you know me. And I’m. Plus I’m putting this out there and God knows who’s going to hear this. But if you know me, you call me Larry. Right? If you don’t know me, you’re looking at my LinkedIn and says Lawrence. So I know when I get a LinkedIn request and it says, hi, Lawrence, that I don’t know the person versus hi, Larry. So I use that as well as a tool as well, you know, because there’s a little differentiation because of Larry being a nickname for Lawrence.
00:33:40 Tony
Yeah, I have that.
00:33:40 Larry
So there’s different games you can play.
00:33:42 Tony
Right. I have that with Tony and Anthony. If somebody reaches out with Anthony, I know it’s not somebody who, who knows me.
00:33:48 Larry
Exactly. Yeah. And it’s super annoying.
00:33:51 Tony
So now we’ve, well, now we’ve given away that secret, Larry.
00:33:55 Larry
Now we’re. Now, now we’re. Now I’m going to get inundated with people. Hey, Larry, listen to the podcast. But, you know, I’ll still be able to figure it out.
00:34:03 Tony
So I never. I have many questions I could ask you, but one question I always want to talk to people about is, you know, the, the influence of AI. And I’ll call this Marketing 2031. And I’m as, I follow AI closely, as I continue to see it integrate into workflows, changing how business is done, changing how we do business. I look at things like marketing and I say, okay, so what are you going to see five years from now if we were having the same conversation? I know of a very famous company, I won’t mention her name, but I know they’ve gotten reduced traffic to their website because they feel a lot of it is due to AI, because AI screening a lot of information and putting it in a format in a way that they don’t have to go directly to a website. And of course, we’ve known for years with search engines, you know, they’ll go out to specific parts of your website and not go to your home page where you, you know, traditionally, years ago, would put a lot of your upfront advertising. So what do you think over the next five years with AI, what do you see? How do you see your job changing and how do you see it changing for how you do some of the tools of your job?
00:35:24 Larry
Yeah, you know, this is a very interesting topic to go down, you know, if you go to any trade show right now, specifically in healthcare, but everybody’s talking about AI, Right? I go to every single marketing conference I go to. Everybody’s talking about AI.
00:35:42 Tony
Yep.
00:35:42 Larry
And there’s like, you know, AI is going to replace marketing, it’s going to replace marketing. It’s not. Right. AI is a tool that marketers can use to do their job better. But if you look. Let’s look at even various websites. I think Engadget did it many more. Right. They basically say this article was written by AI. Right. And you can tell when people write in, because different One of these AI LLMs have different giveaways. If an organisation is replacing people like myself with AI, they’re doing themselves an extreme disservice. Right.
We use AI in a way that is a tool to assist us to do better. We use it to help us draught content, we use it to, you know, manipulate ideas. We use it to help us be a little bit more creative than we can be on our own. And there are so many different specific skill sets in marketing, whether it’s someone who’s a graphic designer or someone who’s a video editor or someone who’s a writer. And I’ve seen people who put images out there, it happens online all the time where they say, you can tell the person is AI because all of a sudden there’s a sixth finger or, you know, their right ear is, you know, three inches longer than the left ear or the contouring is wrong. So five years from now, I suspect that AI is going to be even stronger.
Right, It’s going to be a more powerful tool, but you still need that level of human interaction in a B2B or B2C world, because people understand that AI if 100% going off of the AI or something, they can tell if the content they’re reading, if the image they’re looking at, the TV commercial they’re seeing is AI. There’s no emotion to it, there’s no Feeling to it and without that, to me, marketing falls on deaf ears. And that human piece still needs to be there. I’ve seen it. There’s someone I know was touting the fact that, hey, I wrote this white paper and I’m really proud of it. And they put it out on the company, their company’s website, and I know personally that person, you’re not really a writer.
So I downloaded it, I gave them fake information on a form and I downloaded it and I dropped it in my AI checker and it was written 98% by AI, so. And yes, I dropped it in the tool and I’m a marketer and I read it, I saw that. But that means that he maybe prompted a few things and had this thing write a white paper and he dropped it out as thought leadership that had no human interaction at all. And to me that’s not valuable because the only thing that’s in there, the content, is just stuff that was curated from various other places and had not a single personal thought on that topic. And a white paper, this as an example, is meant to be something that is showing or demonstrating extreme knowledge of a topic. Right. So you do that. Five, five years from now, AI is going to be more powerful, it’ll help us do more things. But also at the same time, there’s an evolution that’s going to happen in marketing practises, or what marketing is viewed as, or channels that we’re going to be doing thing as.
00:39:42 Tony
Right.
00:39:42 Larry
AI can’t create this interaction that we’re having. Well, I guess it could, but it wouldn’t be very good. It doesn’t have my 20 plus years of experience, doesn’t have your 30, 40 years of experience out there. Because you have a lot more experience than I do and has a lot more important positions than I have.
00:40:03 Tony
Right.
00:40:03 Larry
But your experience, my experience together creates this video interaction that’s going to be out there. AI can’t do that. And so while I suspect that it’ll be a lot different in five years from now, if companies have gone away from marketing and just use AI, my personal opinion is that those companies are going to be less of a successful company compared to those companies that are using a combination of that human element and that AI element, because I still don’t think that AI can replace marketing. It can replace other things, but it cannot replace the human emotion that’s required to promote product or service.
00:40:55 Tony
Yeah, I agree with that. I think also that a key point is you don’t outsource to a new technology. You Leverage a new technology. A new technology like AI can help you do things differently, in many ways better, but it doesn’t replace some of the core attributes that you have, experience, understanding of the people in the organisations you’re dealing with and some of the other intangibles that can’t be replaced by a technology. But on the other hand, the technology kind of help you think more creatively. It can raise certain questions, it can expand your knowledge and it can do other things that help you if you use it right, build a better marketing strategy. But it can’t, you can’t just outsource your strategy to AI because you’re right, it’s going to lose something and it will become readily apparent to people as, as, as they begin to look at it through something that somebody actually really knows what they’re talking about, as opposed to somebody who’s just using AI to basically outsource their thinking.
00:42:07 Larry
AI right now is. It’s a toy right now I’ve seen in the past three or four days, I’ve seen the same video which is the, the, the big dance at the end of Dirty Dancing, where, let’s see, I’ve seen Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes, the original. I’ve seen Patrick Swayze as a ghost. I’ve seen Bill Murray from the Ghostbusters. And then it’s just doing that little dance and then he turns around and there’s just a random woman in the background, does a little thing and like people are just playing with it, right? It’s a toy to make something entertaining, right? And I mean, sure, someone, I mean, I’ve used it, I’ve created funny images with it.
There was a trend where people were saying, here’s my headshot and here’s all about me. Give me a caricature of what I do. And I had to do it a little bit. And I actually used that caricature as an image on my Facebook profile or some other profiles online because it’s fun, it shows what I do as an individual. But then, okay, show me something business worthy that AI has put out there. It puts out articles that I can tell are written by AI because I’m educated on different tools. So I know if your article is just inundated with M dashes, I know Chat GPT wrote it, right. And if, you know, whatever, you know, Claude has certain.
They all have a different give or different tell of commonality, whether it’s certain terms or certain forms of punctuation to identify that’s written by AI and at Least for me as a consumer, someone who’s going to be 50 years old this year. I don’t want to read something written by AI. I want to read, I want to see stuff that was, that someone did as a human being. Imagine if we had AI way back in 19, in the mid-1980s when Apple came out with 1984 commercial and they said they developed the Mac. Like that’s still hands down probably one of the best commercials ever made. And that was in someone’s mind, right?
00:44:21 Tony
Yep.
00:44:22 Larry
You don’t get that anymore. And that’s, it’s very unfortunate because it’s taking away so much creativity from the human mind and it just bothers me. So.
00:44:32 Tony
No, great. No, that’s, that’s a great answer. Well, we’ve had a good conversation, Larry. We’re going to turn to a couple questions that will wrap this up. The first one is, is when you’re not thinking about healthcare, it what, what do you do to keep you busy?
00:44:49 Larry
I have a six year old daughter who keeps me very, very busy. I try to do as much with her as I can. My wife and I, we love going to concerts, we love live music and yeah, just you know, trying to relax, sometimes a little hard.
00:45:07 Tony
So yeah, I can understand that. And what kind of sites, publications, blogs, podcasts, other types of reference information? Where do you go to when you’re looking to try to find out more about some of the topics we’ve discussed today or, or places you can direct the, the listener?
00:45:30 Larry
Sure. I mean you know there’s thankfully, you know, in healthcare it we have a very tight knit group of individuals you had mentioned earlier sway health. So you know, I go and I talk to a lot of those people who are fellow marketers in healthcare. IT many of them publish their own great content. We have an annual conference each year. We have, you know, from a outside of that space, you know there are so few publications out there now because they’ve all condensed but you know I do read, you know, publications like His Talk, Becker’s Healthcare more the main ones out there and then sometimes talk to, talk to people I know in the space who I know are just very knowledgeable. But that’s where I go if I’m looking to learn about something new.
00:46:14 Tony
Great, great. And then a couple quick responses to end what, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen in your job over the past five years?
00:46:24 Larry
Oh man, the biggest change is just going to be the. I think two things. One is the constant evolution of technology in marketing and how the marketing Stack has had to evolve and to do everything you want to do. But I think really since COVID when healthcare consistently was very slow to see change, and I used the example of telehealth, it took a worldwide pandemic for telehealth to move from a buzzword to people actually doing something with it because it was needed.
And I really think that ever since that happened, healthcare has been moving quicker with technology and that’s made it more challenging to keep up with all of the technology. And then if you’re a service organisation that offers stuff around that to make sure that you are putting forth the thought leadership and so forth, that’s required to let people know you know what you’re talking about and can help them with that technology.
I think that’s very welcomed in the space because I know it used to be so slow and it would just like, oh my God, let’s do something, please. Let’s not have a sales cycle that’s 16 months, let’s bring it down. I’ve seen the sales cycles have gotten shorter, healthcare has gotten quicker and I think it’s beneficial to the patient across the board because there’s so much great technology out in the space that provider organisations should be implementing. And maybe you’re doing it a little quicker now. To me, that’s probably one of the bigger changes out there.
00:48:02 Tony
So it really led to. My second question was what’s the biggest changes you’ve seen in healthcare over the last five to 10 years? So I guess you’re saying the speed, huh?
00:48:11 Larry
The speed, yeah, definitely the speed of. In which things are being implemented, the way technology is coming out. Of course, AIs played a big role in that too. Right. AI adoption in healthcare is a big. Has picked up quite a bit if you look over the last couple of years, you know, the EHR vendors, you know, Oracle, you know, building a whole new EHR around, around AI. And then, you know, Epic announced all their great things they’re doing with, with AI this past user group meeting and just the technology is on an uptick much quicker and adoption is much quicker lately.
00:48:48 Tony
Absolutely. Well, Larry, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and you gave some great insights and best of luck to you and your future journeys and.
00:49:02 Larry
Well, thank you for having me on the podcast. I appreciate, enjoyed the conversation and yeah, thank you again, it’s been a pleasure meeting you.
