Media strategy for
industries that can't afford to get it wrong.

20 years of multichannel experience across healthcare, pharma, financial services, and other regulated industries.
Knowledge is free. Knowing what to do with it isn't.

Jason Dellaripa
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The short version.

I'm a marketing leader with 20 years of multichannel media experience. Healthcare and pharma are my home base, where I've led HCP and patient campaigns across rare disease, diagnostics, specialty therapeutics, hospital systems, health insurance exchanges including Medicare and ACA, and addiction recovery. I've also spent significant time in financial services, CPG, education, and nonprofit.

That cross-industry range is intentional. Working across regulated verticals like pharma and financial services taught me how to build campaigns where compliance, measurement, and stakeholder complexity all intersect. Working in CPG and consumer brands taught me speed, scale, and performance rigor. The combination is what I bring to every engagement.

I've also led teams of 25+ people, with 6 direct reports managing their own teams underneath them. That means hiring, restructuring, mentoring, and building the kind of team culture where people actually want to do great work. I'm not just a media operator. I've been the person setting direction, defining strategy, and making sure the right people are in the right seats.

In pharma specifically, I work with cross-functional partners including medical affairs, market access, advocacy, and regulatory teams. I know how to work through MLR, develop compliant patient-facing materials, and build HCP targeting frameworks within platform and privacy constraints.

I'm based in Auburn, Alabama, home of Auburn University, and have spent my career working across agencies of every size and directly with businesses in every industry I've touched.

20
Years in multichannel media strategy
16
Years advising businesses directly
$200M+
In media budgets managed annually
10+
Industry verticals served
25+
People managed across direct and indirect reports

Where this comes from.

Agency-side leadership across holding companies, independents, and direct client partnerships.

2025 – Present
VP, Integrated Media – Health & Wellness
Burson (WPP) • New York
Leading multichannel media strategy across pharma and health sciences accounts including Bayer, Amicus Therapeutics, and Exact Sciences. Overseeing campaigns across search, social, programmatic, EHR, POC, endemic, and P2P. Developing HCP and DTC segmentation frameworks including rare disease patient journeys.
Pharma Rare Disease HCP/DTC MLR Compliance
2024 – 2025
VP, Media Strategy & Growth
SocialScience • Philadelphia
Primary client contact for Stride Health, a leading ACA health insurance exchange, io.net, a Web3 decentralized computing platform, and NewDays.ai, an AI-powered cognitive health platform treating mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Developed cross-channel strategies integrating SEO, paid media, and content. Built measurement and optimization infrastructure using GA4, Adobe, and Tableau.
ACA/Medicare Health Insurance Web3 Analytics
2022 – 2024
Vice President, Director
Starcom (Publicis Groupe) • Chicago
Led cross-functional media teams overseeing budgets up to $200MM annually across clients including Alcon (a Novartis company), Planet Fitness, Kellogg's, HealthInsurance.com, and Blue Lantern Health. Managed DTC/HCP and CPG relationships, spearheaded business development, and drove innovation through advanced analytics.
$200MM Budgets Team Leadership Business Development
2007 – 2022
Partner, Digital Media Practice Lead
Blacklight Media & Analytics • New York
11+ years at an independent agency managing $50M+ in combined B2C and B2B marketing budgets. Clients included Auxilium Pharmaceuticals, Capital One, OneMain Financial, and other healthcare-related brands. Led acquisition strategy for ING DIRECT, BBVA, and UMGC. Built and led a global team crafting full-funnel campaigns across financial services, healthcare, and education.
FinServ Healthcare B2B/B2C Partner
2008 – 2010
Senior Account Manager
Wahlstrom Group (IPG) • Norwalk, CT
Managed digital media strategy for Microsoft Xbox, Cathay Pacific Airways, and Toyota at Interpublic's Wahlstrom Group. Led a team of four strategists running national and local campaigns, owned KPI development and performance reporting across the client portfolio, and oversaw landing page optimization and platform implementations.
IPG Microsoft Xbox Cathay Pacific Toyota

Regulated industries.
Multichannel strategy.

The work lives where compliance meets performance, where the audience is segmented by condition, credential, or coverage tier, and where every claim needs substantiation.

Pharma & Biotech Media

Full-funnel HCP and DTC campaign strategy across rare disease, specialty therapeutics, and diagnostics. MLR-compliant creative development and patient journey mapping.

Financial Services

Acquisition strategy for banking, fintech, and insurance products. FINRA-aware campaign development and performance measurement across regulated channels.

Measurement & Analytics

Incrementality frameworks, attribution modeling, and platform evaluation. Translating platform metrics into the business outcomes your stakeholders actually care about.

Media Planning & Buying

Cross-channel planning across search, social, programmatic, endemic, EHR, POC, and emerging platforms. Budget allocation and optimization at scale.

Nonprofit & Education

Donor acquisition, enrollment campaigns, and growth strategy for organizations where mission drives the work and every dollar of spend has to be justified.

AI-Augmented Strategy

Using AI to compress the assembly layer of campaign work so more time goes to judgment, stakeholder management, and the decisions that actually move outcomes.

What the work actually delivered.

35%
Lower cost per lead

Restructured paid media across the health insurance exchange space, cutting lead generation costs by over a third within the first six months of engagement.

Health Insurance
+18%
Lead-to-enrollment conversion

Improved lead quality so more prospects actually converted to enrolled members. Better targeting and channel mix, same spend.

Health Insurance
Cost per $ deposited
Value-based acquisition

Most banks optimize media for account opens. I built a framework that tied back-end deposit data to platform performance, so we could optimize for the customers actually bringing in money, not just the ones signing up.

Financial Services
300%
Media investment scaled

For early-stage health tech and Web3 companies, built CAC benchmarks in 90 days and scaled paid media 3x while protecting unit economics.

Web3 & Digital Health
A note on budgets: Every result above started the same way: "how many customers do we actually need?" Work backward from there. The budget becomes an output of the math, not an input. Factor in lifetime value, because what you can afford to pay for a customer worth $5,000 is very different from one worth $500.

Run the numbers yourself.

Two tools I built to help you think through budget planning and campaign readiness before we ever get on a call.

Media Budget Calculator

Start from outcomes, work backward to budget. Enter your targets and see what the math says.

Enrolled members, account opens, paying users, etc.

What % of leads become customers?

Current or estimated

Revenue per customer over time

What you're spending now, if anything

Your numbers

Leads needed per month
Baseline monthly budget
Estimated CAC
CAC as % of LTV
Recommended monthly range

Campaign Readiness Assessment

Score your organization's readiness to run compliant, multichannel media. Select your industry to get tailored questions. Takes about 2 minutes.

What industry are you in?
Pharma & Biotech
HCP, DTC, rare disease
Health Insurance
ACA, Medicare, exchanges
Banking & Finance
Deposits, cards, wealth
Lending & Fintech
Personal, mortgage, BNPL
Digital Health
Telehealth, health tech, wellness
CPG & Retail
Consumer brands, DTC, e-comm
Education & Nonprofit
Enrollment, donor acquisition
Other
SaaS, Web3, services, etc.
out of 100

Want help closing these gaps? Let's talk about where your media program stands and what it would take to get it ready.

Get in touch

On AI, agencies, and
what comes next.

AI is changing the shape of agency work. The execution layer (pulling platform data, building reports, formatting decks) is getting compressed fast. The roles doing that work today will look different going forward, and the teams that adapt early will have a real advantage.

The strategic layer stays. Someone still has to know which data to trust, which recommendation is too simple, and which stakeholder is going to push back. In regulated industries, that judgment carries even more weight because getting it wrong means compliance risk, not just a bad performance week. AI frees up more time to focus there, which is where the real value has always been.

AI compresses the execution so more time goes to the decisions that actually matter. The teams that figure out how to use it well will have an edge. The ones that don't will fall behind.

From "The Practice You Already Built" // Dellaripa, 2026

Platform automation is moving in the same direction. The major ad platforms are building toward a model where they handle targeting, bidding, and creative rotation end-to-end. For small advertisers, that model is nearly here. For larger organizations running across multiple channels, geographies, and measurement frameworks, the platforms can't do it alone. The measurement layer is still fragmented, and making sense of that complexity is where experienced strategists add the most value.

Regulated industries add another layer on top of that. MLR review, compliance requirements, HCP targeting constraints, rare disease patient journeys, and indication-specific creative restrictions all require hands-on expertise. A media plan for a pharma brand can't be fully automated when every ad needs legal review and every claim needs substantiation. That complexity is where this work lives.

The way I see it: the tools are getting better, the platforms are getting smarter, and the easy parts of this job are disappearing. What's left is the hard stuff. Strategy, measurement, stakeholder judgment, and knowing when the data is telling you something real versus something convenient. That's the work I've built my career around, and it's more relevant now than it's ever been.

Read more of my thinking on media strategy and the work  or  ask me anything about the industry.

From the people I've worked with.

Brands I've worked with.

Bayer pharmaceutical media strategy client
Capital One financial services media client
Kellogg's CPG advertising client
Planet Fitness national media client
Exact Sciences diagnostics media strategy client
OneMain Financial lending media client
Cathay Pacific airline advertising client
Amicus Therapeutics rare disease pharma client
University of Maryland Global Campus education media client
Harvard Health Publishing healthcare media client
University of Minnesota Health system media client
Alcon Novartis eye care pharma media client
Stride Health insurance marketplace media client
io.net decentralized computing media client
HealthInsurance.com health insurance media client
Outcome Trading programmatic advertising client

Let's talk.

If you're looking for someone who understands regulated industries, knows how to build and run multichannel campaigns at scale, and has the judgment to manage complex stakeholder environments, I'd welcome the conversation.