Episode 40: From CPG to Healthcare – AI, Regulatory Constraints, and Creative Optimization

In this episode of The Digital Clinic, we explore the dramatic transition from consumer-packaged goods to medical device marketing with Michel Montenegro, Global Digital Lead & Content Operations Manager at a global medical device organization. 

Michel shares his journey from executing performance marketing at billion-dollar CPG brands like Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Kimberly-Clark, to navigating the highly regulated world of healthcare marketing. We discuss how regulatory constraints fundamentally transform the marketer’s approach, forcing deeper attention to customer needs, value propositions, and strategic preparation, and why these limitations actually elevate marketing effectiveness. 

The conversation explores AI’s role in healthcare marketing, from avatar-driven content to creative variation strategies that maintain compliance while driving performance. We examine the importance of transparency in AI usage, building trust in regulated environments, and shifting from product-focused campaigns to patient-centered partnerships that extend throughout the entire healthcare journey. 

This episode delivers actionable insights for marketers navigating regulated environments, demonstrating how strategic thinking, AI-powered innovation, and compliance-first approaches can transform constraints into competitive advantages and create meaningful impact on patient outcomes. 

Listen & Subscribe:

The Transition from CPG to Healthcare Marketing 

Michel Montenegro: I had to reinvent myself in terms of how I would execute a campaign that I call performance marketing. It was both shocking and also intriguing in terms of how much I had to learn on the anatomy side because of healthcare and also because of how regulated this space was. 

Aaron Burnett: You have a fascinating background. You started on the CPG side, and not just on the CPG side. You worked for three of the most globally recognized brands in the world: Kimberly Clark, Unilever, and Proctor and Gamble. What led you from a very long, very successful career there to working for one of the largest medical device manufacturers in the world? 

Michel Montenegro: I already had 20 years of experience in CPG, and I thought that trying other industries would be interesting. In the middle of COVID, there were two industries that were growing. One was technology and the second one was healthcare. The company I worked for is a technology company in the healthcare industry, so I thought it was a good transition during COVID. 

Aaron Burnett: Very different environments. CPG, relative to medical device manufacturing or healthcare marketing, is relatively unconstrained. As you shifted into working for a medical device manufacturer, what, if any, adjustments did you need to make to your thinking and the degrees of freedom that you had as a marketer? 

Navigating Regulatory Constraints 

Michel Montenegro: It was both shocking and also intriguing in terms of how much I had to learn on the anatomy side because of healthcare and the medical therapies and specialties, but also because of how regulated this space was. So understanding the approval process through clinical, regulatory, legal, market access teams before getting anything out there, and I had to reinvent myself in terms of how I would execute a campaign that I call performance marketing, usually having changes on a daily basis, having to go through all this bureaucratic process of getting everything pre-approved. So, what I learned was that there was a way I would put a lot of pressure on these teams by getting them to approve and having them go through hundreds of collateral assets, ads that they could approve prior to executing the campaign. So, when we optimized based on performance, we already had all those versions pre-approved. Right. So that’s what I’ve been doing actually, is having different backgrounds, fonts, call to actions, creatives, you know, static versus motion video, AI avatars versus real people being interviewed. So being agile in getting all those different copies approved and then executing in so many different ways, but having all that, let’s say, data bank of assets approved so that we could play with that during the campaign. 

Aaron Burnett: Right. So, when you start with a base campaign, you are starting with version A, the launch version of these assets. How many alternate versions do you have banked or available so that you can iteratively test and continue to drive performance when you launch the campaign? 

The 20-Variant Strategy 

Michel Montenegro: At least 20 versions where the versions are not very different between each other, but they are alternatives in terms of call to actions and how you mix creative versus copy and all those different iterations of the same ad. 

Aaron Burnett: What is the purview of your current role? You referenced performance marketing. I know that you have deep, deep expertise in content strategy, content marketing, and brand strategy. What’s your scope in your current role? 

Michel Montenegro: I’m a global digital marketer. I mostly execute in the US, but I’m part of a global team where we leverage our work and campaigns so that they can be leveraged in different regions. So, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s everything from strategizing in terms of identifying channels, recommending strategies, all the way to producing the assets and executing the campaigns, measuring, analyzing, and recommending optimization for those campaigns. 

Aaron Burnett: Are you focused on a particular medical device or vertical or condition? Or is your span of influence across the entire suite of devices and conditions that your current employer serves? 

Michel Montenegro: The company I work for is huge, so it’s just one of the operating units within the company. 

Aaron Burnett: As you shifted from CPG, and I think what I would say is a very well understood and broadly capable performance marketing framework, inclusive of, you know, right up to audience targeting, optimization and performance reporting into medical device manufacturing, which is more constrained, did you find that you had to change your thinking about the data available to you as you developed strategy, and have you had to adapt in the way that you report on performance and optimize your campaigns as well? 

Michel Montenegro: Because of privacy constraints, there’s a lot of adaptation in terms of the kind of data that we have access to and how we can learn from campaign performance. It’s more generic, I would say, so that you can execute more on behavior rather than on demographics, for example. Right? The other big adaptation has been in creative. Right? Like, how much out of the box can you recommend? And then actually putting yourself in your audience’s shoes so that whatever you do is not only relevant to your brands and company and products, but also, and I would say mainly to their needs. Right? So, what is relevant to them? What are we talking about when it comes to thought leadership? How relevant and how much are we meeting our audience needs when it comes to content, so that it’s actually being consumed, it’s grabbing attention, it’s being used in a way that is relevant to them. And then we are ultimately meeting our digital marketing KPIs. 

Aaron Burnett: I know that you have a very successful past in CPG, so taking nothing away from that. But I’m curious to know whether in shifting to marketing medical devices, that constraint that you just described, you feel that you’ve had to become a better marketer, more attuned to the customer base and their needs than you were in a CPG context. 

Becoming a More Detailed Marketer 

Michel Montenegro: I would say I am a much more detailed marketer nowadays in terms of paying attention to nuances, paying attention to things that might have been overseen by marketers in the past when it comes to understanding value propositions, understanding features and benefits, but also understanding what have been barriers in the past that we can overcome through our campaigns and by our campaigns in terms of content, copy specifically, but also tools that they can use. Usually, marketers think about video, images, copy in general, and you’re thinking about channels such as email and maybe LinkedIn, but what about apps? What about software that can make their lives easier at an operating room when the support team, clinical specialist, and sales reps are in the OR with the HCP and they don’t have a wifi signal, for example? How do they access this support asset that can overcome issues in the middle of the surgery? Right? So, it’s actually being there when and where they need us so that we can overcome those barriers. It’s not just about promoting our products before. The question is, how do you become relevant to them? Not only before, but also during, so that they understand that you are an effective and efficient partner throughout the whole process, and not just before you started promoting your products and you met your objective in terms of selling what you wanted to sell, but then what happens after? And that becomes the loyalty aspect of the funnel where you create retention and you create trust and you create loyalty. 

Aaron Burnett: You’ve mentioned content strategy and brand strategy several times. I know that’s an area of deep expertise for you. How do you think about and employ content strategy in the context of medical device manufacturing? 

Michel Montenegro: There’s a big barrier at the beginning because of your lack of knowledge of the industry, but then also about the therapy and then your products and the anatomy, and what are actually the barriers that you need to help your HCPs to overcome. So that’s a learning curve, and I would say that after you go through that learning curve, you start understanding what’s really relevant to them, and then offering content that is actually overcoming those barriers. So, there’s a delicate aspect of this learning curve where you need to rely a lot on product marketers before you really understand what they need and how you can help them with that kind of content. But then what kind of questions do you ask your product marketers so that you can identify those faster through them and then help them achieve their business objectives? 

Aaron Burnett: You talked about creative and development of 20 creative alternates for any base creative or base asset. When you launch a campaign, AI, of course, is more than in the zeitgeist. It’s, you know, occupying a non-trivial part of every marketer’s brain at this point. How are you thinking about and using AI for content strategy? And then I’m also curious to know whether you’re using it for creative variation as well. 

AI-Powered Avatar Videos 

Michel Montenegro: Yes. And something I’ve learned in the past few weeks is how much better can an avatar video perform versus a real video interview. Oh, really? Yes. I was so shocked to see. Of course, we tested static, moving ads, video ads, but then we also recorded real doctor interviews and we had variation of avatar videos all using the same copy and slight variations of female avatars versus male avatars, backgrounds. Of course, copy variations, but then how much better one avatar video performed versus the other, and versus real videos was shocking to me because you always have that doubt about will people perceive this as real? And I don’t think that’s the relevant question to ask. It’s more about whether the content information that you are sharing is credible. And what is making it credible? Because when the copy is the same, and you’re just making variations in terms of who is delivering the message, it’s what’s making the difference. You are like, oh my God, this is eye-opening. Because it’s not only about the what, but the how you are delivering what’s making the difference. 

Aaron Burnett: Can you give us a sense for how much better the avatar video performed? 

Michel Montenegro: Up to five, eight times better. We made weekly rounds of variations to have enough data to make a decision before changing something. Right? So, if I’m not mistaken, this was five rounds, five weeks of variating. So making changes to videos starting with a set of three videos where we had real people versus avatar videos being compared and then making slight variations and optimizing on a weekly basis where the end game, or the winner, let’s call it the winning asset, was performing up to eight times better than the initial round of videos. 

Aaron Burnett: That’s incredible. What platform, what technology did you use for the avatar-driven videos? 

Michel Montenegro: I am working with an agency that has the software. I’m not sure what the software is that they’re using for creating these videos, but I wouldn’t say it’s like a very costly platform that if you don’t have that one specifically, it wouldn’t perform. I would say it’s any avatar video technology that is currently available would help you achieve this performance and this optimization. 

Aaron Burnett: We have also been tracking AI around development of creative content and in particular, creative variation for optimization purposes for the last 18 months or so. And started by trying to build something ourselves, and decided very quickly that was a fool’s errand, and ended up deciding waiting for other platforms and other major players to evolve and improve was probably the wise thing. And it’s been incredible to see the profound improvement in the quality of visual assets that you can develop from even the most commonly available visual platforms. 

Attention Grabbing and Content Structure 

Michel Montenegro: I would say there’s also things that people need to consider that are not only related to the technology and how real or not the avatar comes across, but it’s also about the attention grabbing at the beginning of the video, but then how much more dynamic do you make this after a few seconds. So it’s not just a video of somebody talking at you for three minutes. It is attention-grabbing at the beginning, couple of seconds. And then how do you go from there and how you transition into the actual content, which is relevant to your audience? It might be a website, it might be a paper, it might be a clinical study, research, et cetera. So you jump into relevant content right away. It’s not only about the creative, it is about the content. So how do you mix? And how do you play with those different aspects of a piece like that so that people will stay and watch the whole thing, versus, oh, how interesting this is, and then they jump off five seconds after. 

Aaron Burnett: And of course you have so much more freedom to make those adjustments in an avatar-driven video than you do if you’ve shot live action video. 

Michel Montenegro: Exactly. And after you have copy approved, it’s so easy. Right? Because you have some freedom within these guardrails, where we can switch words. You can start with a different paragraph. You can go straight to the meat of the value proposition instead of having long introductory pieces where people need to wait until they get what’s really valuable to them. So that might make a difference. So just playing around with call to actions and different information, and how you organize the information within that frame of reference. 

Aaron Burnett: Your focus, while working on CPG, you developed a clear understanding, a deep understanding for the power of storytelling, of narrative in connecting with an audience, with your consumers, drawing them in, and then helping them through the conversion process. And you’ve brought the same thing to healthcare marketing. Talk with me a little bit about how you approach marketing through the lens of storytelling and why that has worked well for you. 

Michel Montenegro: I love that question because storytelling has been here for centuries. Right? The way we execute is different because of how much less attention and how much less patience people have in terms of watching a whole story of, you know, a two-hour episode of a movie versus, you know, scrolling after two or three seconds of just watching something and deciding that it’s not relevant. So how you structure the story is different because if you don’t deliver value the first three seconds, people will just scroll and change to the next topic. 

Aaron Burnett: You talked about AI and its use for visual assets. How about the use of AI for content creation? Written assets. Are you using it there as well? 

AI for Content Creation and Variation 

Michel Montenegro: Yes. And I think AI can be very helpful and valuable when it comes to ideating, brainstorming, kicking off ideas, kind of double-clicking on topics that you already have brainstormed or come up with, so that it can give you more depth. Sometimes it can give you more breadth. I think AI is interesting and relevant by shortening the creative process. The other way I’ve seen it used and I’ve used it myself is for creating variation of creatives, for example, with Adobe Express or all these other tools that we now have, where AI is a critical component for developing assets where you already have the main message approved and you have call to actions, and then what you change is background, contrast, font, size. You can play with so many aspects of the creative by just having, let’s say, three or five variations of things that you know you have to say and have been approved to be said. 

Aaron Burnett: Would you start with a framework, maybe a series of messaging points, and actually use AI to draft content? 

Michel Montenegro: I’ve done it that way for email copy, for example, where I have just the main idea of what I want to say, and then I see it drafted in different ways, and I can just choose, pick, and choose from there. But I would say that sometimes you can also do it when you don’t have the actual idea, and you are just brainstorming, for example. 

Aaron Burnett: Yeah. It can be a very effective muse or foil for ideation. Obviously, we’re also focused on healthcare marketing. We have chosen to stop short of drafting content that is published, but we certainly will use it as that foil to develop ideas, to spider out with idea variations, maybe to develop content frameworks and then have a human being complete a final draft. So, in healthcare, trust is sacrosanct and the credibility of the information that your audience sees is so fundamental to developing a relationship with them. And where content quite often is an initial touch point, a top funnel touch point. How do you think about, how do you reconcile the need to develop trust with the use of AI? How do you use AI in a way that continues to reinforce trust? 

Trust and Transparency with AI 

Michel Montenegro: So it depends on when and how you use it, but definitely when you have a piece of content where AI have been leveraged to develop content, you need to be very upfront by saying what was the role of AI in developing that piece of content. When it’s for internal purposes where there’s so many other processes where you’re just leveraging the tool for drafting, ideating, brainstorming, et cetera, where you don’t need to disclaim it because it’s not part of the end result, right, let’s call it, then there’s no need. So, I would say that because trust is so critical and so relevant and paramount, the transparency and how much upfront you are and candid you are in terms of revealing and disclaiming when and where and how AI has been used, the better. 

Aaron Burnett: When you think about content strategy and leveraging content to drive performance, is your purview only the content that exists within a campaign or on your website, or does it also extend to optimization for prominence and presence in LLMs and the like? 

Michel Montenegro: I would say both. When it comes to developing creative, I would say that it’s easy to use, it’s fast in helping you create variations. And that’s where we see the most value. When it comes to research, when it comes to clinical papers, et cetera, we don’t use it because the data, the source, who said what is so critical that we don’t risk having the intervention of LLMs or AI tools in those kind of critical content pieces where those papers need to be a hundred percent, you know, sourced from whoever did the research, whoever performed whatever was performed in a data collection and that we don’t have the intervention whatsoever of AI during those. 

Aaron Burnett: As you develop and produce and promote content, how do you think about ensuring that the content you create is frequently and prominently cited in LLMs themselves? How do you win share of voice in LLMs? 

Michel Montenegro: There’s a way of training, creating AI agents where everything that is developed is based on documents and papers that you use to train the agent and feed the AI tool, so that things that come out are mostly, and you can never contain that a hundred percent, but are mostly focused on whatever you’re feeding the AI. It can always go rogue and start hallucinating, and that’s where the editing, the review, and the post approval by legal, regulatory, and clinical teams is so important because that’s when you make sure that everything that you are offering as an end piece has been filtered with all those expert eyes. Right? You’ve done the quality assurance of the whole process. 

Aaron Burnett: After spending so many years in CPG and shifting to healthcare marketing, what’s one of the most surprising things that you have experienced? What’s the big surprise in making that shift? 

The Rewards of Healthcare Marketing 

Michel Montenegro: There’s been pleasant and not-so-pleasant surprises. I was going to ask both sides, so that’s perfect. The not-so-pleasant is the agility and the creative aspect of campaign development. The pleasant side, I would say, is, and I would say rewarding, is how much of an impact can you make when it comes to patient’s quality of life by enabling surgeons and HCPs to do a better job because of the technology that you provide, the information that you provide and the things that you share and help enable them to do. It’s always through them. Right? So, everything we do is for them, ultimately with the same objective, which is improving patient outcomes. 

Aaron Burnett: I think everybody wants to feel that their work has meaning and impact. There are some industries where that’s less clear than others, and maybe you have to do more mental gymnastics to convince yourself of that. But I share your perspective that this is one where every day, if you’re paying attention to the people you’re serving and the people you’re reaching and the value being delivered, it’s absolutely clear that the work has meaning. 

Michel Montenegro: Yeah. And we have company events where everything is about patients’ stories and testimonials, and when you see the impact of the work that you do, that’s when you feel so rewarded. I would say in terms of the meaning and realizing the meaning and the relevance of the work. 

Aaron Burnett: Well, thank you for doing the work that you do. I think that’s a great place to leave this. I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much for your time.