Using TV, Radio, and SMS to Crack the Upper Funnel with Neil Walker

What do you do when your audience doesn't know your solution exists?

Not “doesn't know your brand.” Doesn't know the solution. Doesn't know there's a treatment to look for, a category to consider, a search to run. The problem they have is real — but the path to solving it is invisible to them.

This is the challenge that defines a surprisingly wide slice of healthcare marketing. And it's the challenge Neil Walker has cracked twice.

As VP of Growth at Oar Health, a direct-to-consumer telehealth company treating alcohol use disorder, Neil operates in a category where the medication has been FDA-approved since the 1990s — and most people, including most primary care physicians, have never heard of it. Search intent is nearly zero. Not because the audience doesn't exist, but because they don't know to look.

Neil didn't optimize his way out of that. He built a media mix where 70% of spend runs through TV and radio, layered in SMS as a compliant alternative to retargeting, and grew OR Health out of a months-long plateau into sustained monthly volume gains — with CAC down 20-30% in the process.

His conversation with Freshpaint CMO and Marketing Rounds host Ray Mina breaks down the playbook — including how he pulled it off at Ro first, and what he refined the second time around.

1. When Search Has a Structural Ceiling

The core tension in Neil’s story isn’t unique to alcohol use disorder. It’s a structural reality for any healthcare category where the audience doesn’t yet know a solution exists. 

“If you were to ask a thousand people on the street, or even a thousand primary care practitioners, most won't have heard of the treatment,” Neil explained. That’s not a gap you close with a better keyword or bidding strategy. 

Oar Health’s challenge was compounded by an additional constraint.

Facebook's ad policies restrict certain stigmatized health conditions, and alcohol use disorder is one of them. What that constraint forced, ultimately, was the right move. Instead of chasing the next optimization within intent-based channels, Neil leapfrogged them entirely and went straight to upper funnel: TV first, then radio, then a compliant SMS layer on top. The logic was simple but often resisted — if your audience isn't searching for you, you have to go find them.

The results compound in ways that don't show up in last-click reports. Oar Health’s brand search went from representing about 20% of their total Google spend to 70%. They now have eight times the brand search volume of their nearest competitor. When you can't buy intent, you build it — and the downstream lift across organic, direct, and branded search tells the real story.

What this means for you

Before you decide which channels to add, ask a more fundamental question: does your audience know to search for what you offer?

If your category is undersearched — not because of competition, but because of awareness — optimizing within intent channels will keep hitting the same ceiling. The question isn't how to get more from Google. It's whether Google can ever be the primary engine for a category your audience hasn't discovered yet.

2. What the Launch Playbook For TV Actually Looks Like

The most common objection Neil hears from healthcare marketers considering TV is some version of this sounds expensive and unaccountable. His answer to both is specific.

On budget: Oar Health started at 30,000 per week. By buying 15-second ad units on linear TV — roughly half the cost of a 30-second unit — and targeting networks with lower CPMs (news, business news, sports), Neil was consistently getting CPMs around $1. That budget, deployed correctly, generated enough placements to run a genuine experiment: two creatives, multiple day parts, multiple networks, with readable signal within one to two weeks.

On creative: Neil spent about $25,000 on an animated spot with a freelancer he'd used at Ro. Prior analysis across Ro's TV campaigns had shown that well-executed animated ads performed as well as polished live-action productions. Production value wasn't the variable. Message clarity was.

The first Oar Health creative test proved the point. They ran two ads simultaneously — one that opened with the problem, one that led with the solution. Within two weeks, the problem-led ad was clearly outperforming. That single insight delivered roughly a 20% efficiency gain. It came from a modest budget and a $25K creative, not a full production cycle.

On day parting: Day parting, if you’re unaware, is scheduling ads to run at specific times of day and it is where Neil's patient-centered thinking becomes most apparent. Conversion rates at Oar Health are highest in the mornings — and highest on Mondays, or the day after a major drinking occasion like Halloween. The audience's motivation to change isn't constant. There are windows when people are more likely to take a step, and windows when they aren't. Linear TV lets you concentrate spend in those windows.

What this means for you

The barrier to entry for linear TV is lower than most digital-native marketers assume — but only if you buy it like a direct response channel, not a brand awareness play.

• Start with 15-second units on lower-CPM networks
• Run two creatives from the beginning so you're generating insight, not just impressions
• think about your audience's psychology before you set your day parts — when are they most likely to act, and why? The answers might surprise you

3. SMS as the Compliant Bridge Between Awareness and Conversion

Once Oar Health had morning and daytime day parts producing efficiently, the logical next step was scaling into prime time. More eyeballs, more opportunity. They made the investment — and found something unexpected.

Prime time drove strong traffic. Cost per visit looked good. But people weren't converting.

Neil's hypothesis: they were reaching the right audience at the wrong moment. Evening viewers were interested, but not ready to act. Some had a drink in hand. Others simply weren't in the mindset to reckon with a behavior they wanted to change — that reckoning tends to come in the morning, not the evening.

The natural move at this point would be retargeting — reach people who'd shown interest and follow up in paid media. But for the same reasons Oar Health couldn't use Facebook as a retargeting channel,either. They had awareness they couldn't capitalize on, and no obvious digital bridge to close the gap.

SMS was the answer.

Instead of asking prime time viewers to visit the website, Neil’s team invited TV viewers to text a keyword to a shortcode. The viewer gets an immediate automated response introducing them to Oar Health and inviting them to qualify for treatment. From there, they enter a nurture sequence that has grown to 13 messages spaced over roughly three months, on a cadence that becomes less frequent over time.

The data behind the SMS CTA is compelling. About 70% of people who enter the SMS flow convert within the first month. The remaining 30% convert later — with meaningful conversions continuing for up to four months.

What this means for you

SMS gave Oar Health what retargeting would have given them, without the privacy and compliance exposure: a way to stay in conversation with someone who wasn’t ready today but might be ready next week. 

If you're running upper funnel campaigns and treating the website visit as the only valid next step, you're leaving a significant portion of your audience without a path forward. Think about what a compliant, low-friction handoff looks like for someone who's interested but not ready. SMS is one answer. The broader principle applies everywhere.

The Shift Healthcare Marketing Must Make Today

When you think about it, the throughline in Neil’s playbook isn’t really about TV or SMS. It's about recognizing that intent-based marketing has a ceiling — and that for some healthcare categories, that ceiling is lower than most marketers realize.

When you can buy keywords and convert them efficiently, you should. But when growth plateaus and there are no obvious new keywords to buy, optimizing harder within the same channel doesn't raise the ceiling. It just costs more to stay at it.

And when you reach people who aren't ready to convert today, build a compliant, patient-centered path to stay in relationship with them until they are. That's what the SMS layer represents — not a workaround, but a more honest model of how healthcare decisions actually get made.

Experience the full conversation where Neil talks about the day their TV campaign went live a week ahead of schedule, why it took the team a full day to figure out what was happening, and how that accidental launch permanently changed the way he thinks about upper-funnel measurement.