Privacy Fuels Performance: Making Connected TV Measurable in Healthcare

For most healthcare marketers, paid media strategy starts and ends with Google Ads. Search ads feel safe. They’re measurable, immediate, and defensible. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if 80% of your paid media budget is in Google Ads, you don’t have a media strategy. You have an intent strategy. And that’s fine to a degree, but it’s leading marketers straight into a trap.

Google excels at intent capture. When someone searches "urgent care near me" or "best Medicare plan," you can be there at the exact moment they're ready to act. That's the magic of search. It converts reliably and predictably. 

However, intent is increasingly expensive. As competition intensifies and keyword costs climb, marketers who rely solely on search find themselves trapped in a race to the bottom, where every click costs more while every marginal improvement yields less.

At Freshpaint, we see this pattern everywhere. Costs rise. Competition intensifies. Performance plateaus. Budgets keep flowing into the same channel because it’s the only one leadership can see clearly. That’s how healthcare marketing ends up stuck feeding the Google slot machine just to tread water.

Our new integration with MNTN exists to break that cycle by turning privacy into a performance advantage and making Connected TV a measurable, compliant growth channel for healthcare.

How Healthcare Got Stuck in Search

Healthcare has lived under a unique constraint: the need to reach the market while protecting patient privacy. HIPAA, and other privacy laws, made the use of common marketing tools, like cookies, pixels, third-party analytics, nearly impossible. Most platforms simply weren’t built for the strict rules that govern patient data.

As a result, many health organizations retreated to the “safe” side of digital marketing: intent campaigns that use little data and are low on reach. These campaigns allowed healthcare marketers to bid on keywords like “urgent care near me” without having to share data with the ad platforms. It brought in people with intent. But it didn’t generate any demand before intent. Marketers knew this wasn’t the best path forward. It was just the safest one available.

But that safety came at a significant cost. When you only run intent campaigns, you can only measure the final step before someone lands on your site, not everything that influenced them along the way. Over time, that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: the channels that can’t be measured get cut, and the ones that can, usually Google, get overfunded. The budget keeps flowing to whatever shows the last click, even if it’s not what actually drove the decision. That’s when healthcare marketers stopped building demand and started just chasing it.

But here’s the real irony: Healthcare organizations have all the data they need to build demand AND capture it. They just haven’t been able to use it. Think about it. Healthcare possesses more first-party data than almost any other industry. Every appointment booked, every patient portal login, every telehealth session is a data point. Yet this data has been off-limits for marketing teams because of compliance concerns.

Breaking Free with Privacy-First Measurement

The path forward doesn't require abandoning Google as an ad platform, or violating any privacy laws. It requires a privacy-first approach to your entire marketing funnel. When you put privacy at the foundation of your strategy, you’ll be able to broaden what a paid media strategy is in healthcare. 

Until recently, building a privacy-first foundation required heavy engineering resources, which healthcare marketers often don’t have access to. Fortunately, new privacy-first marketing infrastructure has fundamentally changed the equation.

With solutions like Freshpaint's server-side integration with MNTN, you can now capture and unify first-party signals safely within your own protected environment. You can define conversion events like bookings or portal activations, match them to ad impressions, and send only de-identified performance data to ad platforms. This means healthcare marketers can finally run and measure CTV campaigns with the same compliance confidence they have in search.

For the first time, you can connect an ad impression to a patient action without violating privacy rules. You can prove that your CTV campaign drove appointment bookings, not just hope that people saw your ad. You can stop optimizing for the easiest metric to track and start optimizing for the behaviors that actually drive patient growth.

From Capturing Demand to Creating It

The results of broadening your paid media strategy are not theoretical, and can have a very real impact on your intent campaigns. For example, a leading Midwest healthcare provider saw a 92% boost in search conversions after expanding their paid media strategy beyond search. 

The marketers who will win in this next era are those who embrace data to prove the impact of everything that happens before the last click. They'll measure complete care journeys rather than isolated conversions, and they'll use those insights to turn marketing from a cost center to a revenue driver.

If all you ever do is chase existing intent, you'll never create new demand. And in healthcare, where trust and relationships matter more than almost any other industry, that's a strategy that will inevitably hit its ceiling.

CTV is no longer off-limits for healthcare marketers, and the proof is here. See how Freshpaint and MNTN make it possible to run measurable, compliant CTV campaigns that actually drive results: Discover the Freshpaint + MNTN integration

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