Garbage In. Garbage Out.
AI didn’t create healthcare marketing’s biggest problem. It just made it faster, cheaper and harder to ignore.
Here’s the question healthcare marketing leaders are getting right now.
From the CEO. From the board. From the CFO who just read something on a flight and wants to know why marketing isn’t using AI yet.
“What are we doing with AI?”
It’s a fair question. The productivity gains are real. The ability to produce more content, faster, at lower cost is genuinely impressive and getting more impressive by the month.
But here’s the question nobody in that meeting is asking.
What are we producing more of, exactly? And is it any good?
Because here’s the thing about AI. It amplifies whatever thinking preceded it. Give it sharp strategy and a clear brief and it will help you move faster and execute at a scale that wasn’t possible before. That’s genuinely useful.
Give it bad thinking and it will produce bad work. Faster. At greater volume. With complete confidence.
Garbage in. Garbage out. Except now the garbage arrives in your market before anyone inside notices it’s garbage.
This is the AI conversation healthcare marketing is not having.
We’ve watched this movie before. When digital exploded, healthcare marketers rushed in. Suddenly everyone needed a content strategy. Blogs. Social. Digital display campaigns. The volume of output went through the roof. And most of it was forgettable — because the investment was in production, not thinking.
Binet and Field showed us where that led. Effectiveness dropped. The work got busier and less impactful at the same time. Brand building was virtually ignored.
AI is the next version of that trap. Same mistake. Bigger, faster engine.
Here’s what actually drives marketing effectiveness. Not production speed. Not content volume. Not how many headline variations you can generate in 30 seconds.
Diagnosis. Getting close to the audience — really close — and finding the real problem hiding behind the stated one.
A health system came to us with a clean ask: Build a consumer campaign to get more patients enrolled in MyChart. Registration had stalled at 30%. Some agencies — and a prompted AI — would have been producing concepts within the week.
We went digging first.
Turns out patients were trying to enroll, hitting a broken process, finding nobody to help them, and giving up. A campaign would have driven more people straight into that wall. More spend. Worse results. The fix was a process repair and real human support. Not an ad. AI would have executed the wrong answer brilliantly.
That’s the diagnosis problem. But there’s a strategy problem too.
Strategy is the choice of where to play and how to win. Not a tagline. Not a messaging hierarchy. A real decision — with real trade-offs — about what this organization stands for and why anyone should choose it over everyone else making the same promise. AI can generate options. It cannot make the choice. And in healthcare, where so many brands have quietly decided to stand for nothing specific, the choice is everything.
The brief is where diagnosis and strategy come together. It is not a form to fill out. It is the output of real thinking — the place where the insight unlocks the problem and the strategy finds its direction. A strong brief makes everything downstream work better. A weak brief makes everything downstream expensive and forgettable.
AI will not fix a bad brief. The problem is it will execute it beautifully.
If you’ve heard me speak or have read a previous post, you’ve heard me talk about Andrea Pirlo. The legendary Italian midfielder who described American soccer as “a lot of running, too little play.” Pirlo’s gift wasn’t speed. It was thinking. Reading the field. Watching what others couldn’t see. Acting with purpose when the moment was right.
AI is extraordinary at running. Faster than any team you’ve ever fielded. More tireless. More scalable.
That’s not the job.
Your job is to play. To read the field. To find the real problem before anyone starts producing anything. To make the strategic choice that gives all that running somewhere worth going.
The diagnosis. The insight. The strategy. The brief that carries it all.
That’s the thinking that cannot be delegated.
Pirlo didn’t win by running harder.
He won by thinking better.
Let AI do the running. You do the thinking.
One more thing. This post was written with the help of AI. The diagnosis, the argument, the strategic point of view — that was the work. AI helped me run with it. Which is, come to think of it, exactly what I’ve been saying.
Jerry Hobbs is a marketing strategist and the president of Prairie Dog, a healthcare marketing group headquartered in Kansas City.
