What happens when healthcare marketers stop accepting the usual answers? That’s exactly what Chief AI Officer Mike Rousselle and SVP of Program Management Sara Goldman are determined to find out.
They’re the cohosts of Contra Indicated, a new healthcare marketing podcast from OptimizeRx that brings together marketers, data scientists, physicians and other industry voices for candid conversations about AI, data, behavior and the assumptions that shape how healthcare marketing gets done.
The first season, launched in September, takes on “the end of reach-based marketing.” Mike and Sara dig into how reach became one of the industry’s default measures of success, where it still adds value and whether we may be asking it to do more work than it should.
We sat down with them to talk about why they started the podcast, what makes Contra Indicated different and what they hope listeners will take away from the conversation.
Why did you decide to start Contra Indicated, and why now?
Mike: There’s no shortage of conversation about AI, data and healthcare marketing right now. But a lot of it happens at one of two extremes: either very high-level, all-too-dramatic speculation about how everything is going to change because of AI, or very tactical conversations about implementing a specific tool or channel in a silo. We wanted a place to get into the more interesting territory in between: how technology is actually changing the way we understand audiences, make decisions and measure whether marketing is working. We want to give listeners the tools to be able to assess and build their own data and AI-based healthcare systems.
Sara: Marketers are getting hit with ideas from every direction right now: AI, omnichannel, personalization, new measurement models, and more data than anyone knows what to do with. The hard part isn’t hearing about any of it. It’s figuring out what it means when you have a campaign to get out the door. We wanted the podcast to cover both sides: where things are headed, and what it actually takes to make them work in practice.
The name “Contra Indicated” is a little unexpected for a healthcare marketing podcast. Where did it come from?
Mike: We liked the idea of borrowing a familiar healthcare term and turning it slightly sideways. “Contraindicated” normally tells you what not to do. We take inspiration from that phrase on the podcast, by questioning some of the things our industry has decided we are supposed to do.
Healthcare marketing has accumulated a lot of accepted wisdom over the years: how audiences should be built, how campaigns should be measured, what success is supposed to look like. Some of those ideas still hold up. But some of those “shoulds” need to be taken down a peg. So the name felt right for a show that is willing to challenge the standard prescription once in a while.
And yes, I’m also constitutionally incapable of walking away from a topically-relevant wordplay opportunity.
You chose “the end of reach-based marketing” as the focus of the first season. Why was that the right place to start?
Mike: Because reach is one of the most fundamental ideas in advertising, but I’d argue that today we’re using it in a way that pushes the limits of what we can reasonably ask it to do as a metric.
For a long time, reaching more of the “right” audience was a reasonably proxy for doing good marketing. But healthcare gives us the opportunity to ask much more interesting questions. Was this person clinically relevant? Was this provider likely to encounter an appropriate patient? Was the message delivered at a moment when it could actually matter? And what did we learn that should change what happens next?
Reach still matters. The point isn’t that it suddenly becomes useless. The question is whether it should continue to be the organizing principle for how we plan and evaluate campaigns when we can increasingly optimize toward relevance, timing and behavior instead. That felt like exactly the kind of assumption Contra Indicated should start by poking at.
When you say marketers are pushing the limits of reach, what do you mean?
Sara: In the first episode, we talk about Goodhart’s Law: once a measure becomes the target, it stops being a good measure.
Reach is a perfect example. It started as a useful way to see how broadly a campaign was connecting. But once maximizing reach becomes the goal, you end up optimizing for the number instead of the outcome you actually care about.
That matters even more in healthcare. . Two campaigns can reach the same number of people and deliver completely different value, depending on who they reached, when, and where that person was in their healthcare journey.
So the questions have to change. Don’t stop at “How many people did we reach?” Ask: “Were they the right people? Was it the right moment? What happened next? And does what we learned change the next wave of the campaign?”
Reach is still useful. It just shouldn’t be the goal because it’s easy to put on a slide.
Who did you have in mind when creating the podcast, and what do you hope they take away from it?
Sara: We developed this podcast for the people doing the work: brand teams, agency strategists, media planners, analytics teams, technology partners, and everyone else connecting the pieces.
I don’t want anyone finishing an episode learning ten new buzzwords. I want them to leave with one or two things they can use: a question they should be asking, an assumption worth challenging, or a new way to approach a problem.
Healthcare marketing is complicated enough. We’re not looking to make it sound more complicated.
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Contra Indicated promises “unconventional conversations.” What does that mean in practice, and what did you want to do differently from other healthcare marketing podcasts?
Mike: “Unconventional” doesn’t mean being contrarian just for the fun of it. It means being willing to start with the possibility that the conventional answer might not be the best one anymore, especially with so much technical horsepower at our fingertips.
Technology and AI are changing very quickly – I feel like I say this same sentence every year – and then I’m continually surprised at how quickly next year’s changes actually happen! It’s dizzying even for people who specialize in AI, I want to help those who can’t dedicate 8hrs a day to staying up to date, and help them learn in easier chunks. Especially because a lot of the mental models we use to think about marketing were built for a different environment. We wanted a show where we could take some of those ideas apart, look at the evidence and ask what happens if you build from first principles instead.
We also didn't want every conversation to end with a perfectly packaged answer. Some of the most useful discussions start with uncertainty or disagreement – and I LOVE living in that discomfort, because that’s what science is! It’s the study of the truly unknown by probabilistically likely. Like, if Sara tells me an idea is fascinating in theory but impossible to operationalize without six meetings, three spreadsheets (2 made unnecessarily by an AI assistant), and a minor organizational crisis, that’s probably a conversation worth having.
How do your different perspectives shape the conversations you have on the show?
Mike: I naturally gravitate toward what’s possible. Give me a new dataset, a new model or a new way to connect information and I immediately want to know what we could build with it. My spirit animal would probably be a collie.
Sara: And I tend to ask who is going to build it, who needs to approve it, how it fits into everything else already happening and whether anyone has actually explained it to the people who have to use it.
Mike: There’s a big gap between an interesting idea and an idea that actually works in the real world. The tension between those two perspectives is where a lot of our conversations naturally live.
Sara: That’s the industry in a nutshell. Innovation only matters if people can put it into practice, and getting from the idea to the practice is where the real work is.
If listeners remember one idea from the first season, what do you hope it is?
Mike: That the goal of marketing shouldn't simply be to get better at finding an audience. It should be to build a system that gets better at understanding when, where and for whom marketing can actually make a difference.
That’s the bigger shift underneath the conversation about reach. Better data and AI give us the ability to learn continuously rather than making a set of assumptions at the beginning of a campaign and hoping we got them right.
The most interesting question isn’t “How many people can we reach?” It’s “What can we learn, and what will we do differently because of it?” And at the bottom of all healthcare problems is the thing that still gets me up every day, and that’s the idea that the best marketing MUST do right by patients: business success and population health aren’t just 1-1 correlated, they’re causal in healthcare! So, let’s use data and AI to do right by patients, and everything else will fall into place.
Where can people listen to Contra Indicated, and what can they expect from the episodes ahead?
Sara: Contra Indicated is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so listeners can find it wherever they normally get their podcasts.
Season one takes on the end of reach-based marketing from several angles: data, behavior, measurement, AI, and what all of those mean for healthcare marketers day-to-day.
And while we do occasionally use phrases like “learning systems,” no homework will be assigned.
Listen, disagree with us now and then and take something to your next meeting.
One of the concepts we talk about in the first episode is Goodhart’s Law: which states that once a measure becomes the target, it tends to stop being a very good measure.
Reach is a perfect example. It started as a useful way to understand how broadly a campaign was connecting with an audience. But when maximizing reach becomes the objective itself, you can end up optimizing for that number, instead of the thing you actually care about.
