Reflections from the 2025 Healthcare Search Summit

2025 marks the 11^th year of the annual Healthcare Search Summit, a long-standing partnership between PHM and Google focused on sharing innovations in the Search space. Health-focused Search marketers across Publicis Groupe gathered in NYC to connect on the latest trends, share learnings with partner teams and create lasting memories!  

Jennifer Orlando, Supervisor, Paid Search and Madeline Kerr, Senior Associate, Paid Search gave us a behind-the-scenes look at this year’s summit, sharing their key takeaways from this annual event.  

It’s that time of year—the Healthcare Search Summit! This much-anticipated event is always a highlight for our teams, giving us the opportunity to step away from our day-to-day work and focus on learning and collaboration.  We had both attended previous Search Summits, so we were excited to see the evolution of this event and reflect on how the Search landscape has changed within the last year with our Publicis colleagues and partners at Google.

We began our day in Google’s beautiful Chelsea Market office, setting the tone for a day full of energy and connection. PHM’s Peter Levin, SVP, Paid Search and Paid Social and Sandy Impson, Senior Agency Partnership Lead at Google kicked off the day by welcoming the room of Search marketers, and provided some key remarks on how our industry is changing, and how, as health marketers, we carry a unique responsibility with our audiences. Sandy reminded us of the impact of our work and the possibilities of AI, and she shared a personal and touching story about her family navigating new health hurdles. Hearing stories like Sandy’s reminded of us of the truly personal nature of the work we do, and the impact it can have on the lives of our target audiences.

Throughout the day, we heard from panels of our Publicis colleagues, as well as our partners at Google, about the various innovations happening in the Search space, and how we can apply these learnings to our brands. Although the agenda was jam-packed, the panel discussions sparked valuable conversations about the broader digital landscape. One of our favorite sessions was the “Beyond Search: Unifying Search, Social, and Video for Healthcare” panel, which emphasized how these cross-team capabilities can work together seamlessly to achieve our goals.

As we reflect on the day, two main themes emerged from these conversations: AI is fundamentally reshaping the healthcare Search experience, and we must unify strategies across digital products and platform to establish trust. As the digital landscape changes with the advent of new technologies and Search becomes more powerful, we have to be more strategic in how we utilize these new tools to successfully guide our clients.

This year’s summit also taught us how to harness the growing capabilities of the next generation of Search, and to explore possibilities from the lens of a patient. We particularly enjoyed the sessions that touched on how patient behavior is changing on these platforms, characterized by more specific, longer queries and a strong preference for factual, trustworthy information. Consumers are looking to brands for reliability and consistency, so we have a huge responsibility to provide accurate and useful information to them.

Once the day’s programming had concluded, we had dedicated time with our client teams to meet with our Google team representatives live. This allowed for interactive in-person collaboration to discuss the industry changes and product advancements we had reviewed earlier in the day and engage on how we can apply these learnings to our client teams. This quickly turned into an opportunity to brainstorm and think big about how to incorporate these insights into broader team goals.

This in-person collaboration is one of the amazing benefits of this event. Our teams are often spread across the country, so it was a special experience to meet our teammates in person and interact with Paid Search colleagues of all levels. We even met with other health-focused Search marketers from sister Publicis Groupe agencies such as Heartbeat, Razorfish, Digitas, Starcom and Spark who were also in attendance, providing even more opportunity to share learnings and activate on the Power of One mentality that Groupe is known for.  We learned so much from the content sessions at the event, but maybe even more from the connections and conversations we had with our Publicis and Google colleagues on site.  You could definitely feel the PHMLove in the room—and this energy even extended to our Google colleagues, as they surprised one of our Paid Search VPs, Brian Baseman, with cupcakes for his birthday! The entire room singing Happy Birthday to Brian was just one moment among many that made us feel even more connected to this community.

For early career professionals like us, a forum like this can be intimidating. However, we quickly learned that this event provides a welcoming environment with space to be curious, ask questions, and grow. We have gained more from it each year as we gain a deeper understanding of the landscape and how we can apply these learnings to our brands. Leaving this year’s summit, we felt excited about the future of Search and energized to bring the learnings from the day back to our client teams.

Thanks to our counterparts at Google for hosting us for this event, and to our PHM and Publicis leaders for stewarding this fruitful partnership. Until next year!

Connect with Jennifer and Madeline on LinkedIn.

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