By Chris Martin, Senior Director, HealthLink Dimensions
A look at the creative, media, technology and healthcare conversations that made the week worthwhile, and why Advertising Week has an opportunity to recapture the energy that once made it feel like the center of New York advertising.
There are more specialized conferences in advertising than I can count.
Creative has its events. Media has its events. Technology certainly has its events. Healthcare, creators, data, AI, measurement and practically every other corner of our industry have their own gatherings too.
What I have always liked about Advertising Week New York is that it refuses to stay in one of those lanes.
For a few days, creative people, media people, technologists, agency leaders, marketers, publishers, platforms, creators and brands are all thrown into the same place. This year's program included more than 1,300 speakers and 500 sessions spanning creativity, media, AI, adtech, culture, commerce, creators, gaming and healthcare.
That mix is what still makes Advertising Week work for me. The content and the people are still there. What I would love to see now is the event recapture more of the energy, personality and shared experience that once made Advertising Week feel less like a conference and more like advertising taking over New York for a few days.
One theme was hard to miss in the coverage coming out of this year's event: advertising is moving from talking about what new technology might someday do to figuring out what we are actually going to do with it.
Advertising Week's own coverage called it moving past the hype, while Digiday heard a similar shift around AI from experimentation toward implementation. AI, creators, commerce, attention and measurement were everywhere, but increasingly the conversation was about application and outcomes rather than novelty.
I think that's healthy.
Advertising has always been at its best when very different disciplines collide around the same problem.
A great creative idea without the right audience may never get seen. Incredible audience intelligence without compelling creative gives somebody nothing worth paying attention to. Technology without strategy is just technology. Similarly, media without an understanding of people becomes little more than inventory.
Advertising Week gives you the opportunity to move between all of those worlds.
You can hear a creative person talk about an idea, walk a few hundred feet and hear a media executive talk about targeting and attention, then hear a technologist explain what AI can now make possible. Somewhere between those conversations you start connecting things that perhaps weren't connected when you walked in.
That interchange between different minds that work in and influence advertising is probably the most valuable part of the event.
There was plenty happening outside healthcare that reinforced it.
Publicis Media's Eric Levin joined Trevor Noah and Google's Khartoon Weiss, a wonderful and cherished former colleague of mine, for a conversation about creators, including a useful reminder for agencies and brands: if you partner with creative talent, you eventually have to trust that talent enough to create.
Elsewhere, agencies including Carat and Tinuiti were talking about agentic media moving from theory into practice, and where automation can remove friction versus where people still need to provide judgment, context and oversight.
That is the fun of Advertising Week. You don't have to agree with everything you hear. In fact, you shouldn't. The value is being exposed to people thinking about the same business from completely different directions.
And this year, healthcare finally had a more meaningful seat at that table. For me, that mattered.
Advertising Week introduced its first dedicated Health Summit, with programming focused on the issues healthcare marketers are wrestling with every day: trust, data, culture, regulation, AI, HCP and patient engagement, and the responsibility that comes with operating in a category where the stakes are real.
That is important because healthcare can become too insular if we only talk to ourselves. Some of our best ideas will come from creators, consumer brands, commerce, entertainment, AI and the broader media world. At the same time, healthcare brings rigor around privacy, trust, regulation and consequence that the rest of advertising can learn from too. Advertising Week is one of the few places where that exchange can happen naturally.
There were several agency perspectives I particularly liked.
Kelly Millett, EVP, Strategy at Publicis Health Media, joined leaders from Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead and PulsePoint for "The Attention Economy Failed Us. Where Do We Go Next?"
I liked the premise because healthcare marketers spend a lot of time talking about attention. But getting somebody to stop is different from getting somebody to care. The discussion moved the conversation toward receptivity, relevance and timing. It is not simply whether we can reach the right person, but whether we understand enough about where they are in their journey to know when our message may actually matter.
Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer at Butler/Till, moderated "Where Pharma & Healthcare Play Next," which tackled another interesting tension. How does a highly regulated industry become more culturally relevant, more human and, yes, even more entertaining without doing something that erodes trust?
That is a real advertising question, not merely a healthcare question. Healthcare should not have to be boring to be responsible. The challenge is understanding where the line is and creating work that respects both sides of it.
Dr. Susan Dorfman, President and CEO of CMI Media Group, who presents a perspective I al;ways appreciate, participated in "Words Matter: How to Communicate with Humanity in a Regulated, AI World."
That title alone gets at something important. We have become very good at developing increasingly sophisticated ways to find audiences. We should be equally sophisticated about how we speak to them. The discussion took aim at the jargon and language healthcare sometimes hides behind and brought the focus back to communication that actually sounds like one human being talking to another.
Omnicom also brought an interesting data perspective. Mila Kechina, Head of Audience Analytics at Omnicom Media Health, and Brandon Swift, EVP of Data & Analytics at Omnicom Health, joined Acxiom's Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi to discuss how healthcare marketers can move beyond relying almost exclusively on clinical data and develop a more disciplined framework for incorporating additional signals about the people they are trying to understand.
And across the broader Advertising Week ecosystem, Elizabeth Beringer, President of Real Chemistry Media, talked about moving "Beyond the Campaign" and connecting audience intelligence, technology and orchestration so patient and HCP experiences feel less like a collection of disconnected tactics and more like one continuous journey.
Different agencies. Different disciplines. Different approaches. But again, the interesting thing is how much the ideas begin to intersect.
Reach the right people, but understand them. Use more data, but use it intelligently. Automate what technology can make better, but don't automate away judgment. Be culturally relevant, but don't lose trust. Connect channels, but remember there is an actual person moving between them.
That is good advertising, and it is especially important in healthcare where relevance, trust and responsibility cannot be separated from performance.
I hope Advertising Week continues to grow the healthcare component, not by putting it in a corner, but by making it a bigger part of the broader advertising conversation. The dedicated summit is a great start. The next opportunity is more crossover with the creative, media, culture and technology conversations happening everywhere else during the week.
Healthcare marketers should be listening to what consumer brands are learning about culture, what creators are teaching brands about authenticity and what the broader media industry is learning about attention, identity, AI, commerce and measurement. The question is how those ideas apply to patients, caregivers and HCPs.
At the same time, the rest of advertising can learn from healthcare, an industry that has had to think deeply about privacy, regulation, trust, identity and the consequences of getting communication wrong. Those are increasingly advertising concerns too.
That cross-pollination is where this event has a real opportunity, and it is one of the reasons I think the Health Summit can become an increasingly important part of Advertising Week.
And that brings me to the part I most want Advertising Week to recapture: the magic around the event itself.
The experience.
I don't want this to come across as nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. The industry and New York have changed, and Advertising Week should change with them. But the current venue is the weak link: cramped, crowded and, for an event built around creativity and connection, too much like navigating a repurposed shopping mall to become a DMV of Advertising.
That is why the earlier years are worth remembering. Advertising Week had a sense of occasion. The venues had personality, the city felt part of the event, and the closing party was a destination.
Advertising Week New York Wrap Party,
Webster Hall, 2019.
In 2019, Pitbull performed at the official wrap party at Webster Hall, one of those nights the New York advertising community genuinely talked about.
More importantly, it created the kind of networking conferences try to manufacture but rarely can. People stayed. Agency people, clients, publishers, platforms, creatives and marketers mixed, and conversations happened naturally. The event created the connection instead of scheduling it.
That matters! Why? Because some of the best things at Advertising Week do not happen on a stage. They happen in the hallway, at a bar, at a party or in the conversation you did not plan to have.
So when I hear rumors that Advertising Week may be considering a different venue, I hope there is something to them. A better venue won't recreate the magic by itself, but it is the right place to start. Advertising Week deserves a setting that encourages people to linger, collide and connect, and feels worthy of the name.
I'm not suggesting we recreate 2019. I'm suggesting we remember what worked: a venue with character, a shared closing moment, places people wanted to stay, and an event woven into the city around it.
Bring back a closing event people plan around, not one they skip. Give the week a setting with personality. Create the moments where agency people, clients, publishers, platforms, creatives and healthcare marketers stay together long enough for the unexpected conversations to happen.
Because all the pieces are already there. The content is there. The people are there. The industry shows up. The Health Summit proved healthcare belongs in that broader mix. What is missing is some of the connective tissue and energy around all of it.
For healthcare, keep going in exactly that direction: strong content, more senior agency and pharma voices, and more integration with the rest of Advertising Week. Healthcare should be part of the same conversations about culture, creativity, AI, commerce, identity and media shaping the broader industry.
Put healthcare strategists with the best consumer creatives. Put pharma marketers beside people reinventing commerce, entertainment and the creator economy. Put healthcare data people with the technologists reshaping identity and AI. And bring people who would never attend a healthcare conference into the healthcare sessions. The cross-pollination is the point.
That's where it gets really interesting.
Advertising Week New York remains one of the few events where our entire strange, creative, analytical, technology-driven business can still bump into itself, and healthcare now has a real opportunity to be part of that collision rather than operating beside it.
That is worth preserving. And the magic around it is worth bringing back.
Keep building the healthcare presence. Keep mixing the disciplines. Give Advertising Week a home and a closing experience worthy of the people and ideas already inside it. The pieces are there. Advertising Week in New York had magic. Bring that back, and I'll happily be back next year.