Editors’ Note

Jason Brown is the founder and CEO of BPD, the nation’s leading healthcare marketing firm, serving top health systems and industry innovators. Under his leadership since 2002, BPD has partnered with organizations like HCA Healthcare, Google Health, Johnson & Johnson, and Memorial Sloan Kettering to drive transformative marketing outcomes. Committed to service excellence, Brown infused hospitality principles into BPD’s culture through a multi-year collaboration with the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center, earning Fortune’s “Great Places to Work” recognition for 10 consecutive years. His vision extends beyond marketing – he spearheaded the launch of BPD’s AI-driven data platform, delivering precision marketing solutions with proven ROI up to 100:1 for leading health systems. A dynamic speaker, Brown regularly shares insights on healthcare marketing, innovation, and leadership at top industry conferences and universities. Prior to BPD, Brown served as President of William Harris Advertising. He earned a BS degree from the University of Southern California.

Company Brief

A wholly-owned subsidiary of MJH Life Sciences, BPD Healthcare (BPD) partners with the nation’s most ambitious healthcare brands to architect measurable enterprise performance – strengthening the enterprise brand, engaging the highest value patient populations, aligning key clinical referral channels, accelerating service line growth, advancing community and philanthropic impact, and igniting workforce engagement. BPD (bpdhealthcare.com) provides fully integrated solutions that include strategic advisory, marketing and communications, and data solutions and analytics. BPD’s proprietary intelligence platform – powered by national claims data, consumer and physician signals intelligence, and predictive modeling – reveals where growth truly lives. BPD’s team of industry thought leaders, innovators, and operators turn that intelligence into decisive action and industry-leading ROI.

Will you discuss your career journey?

When I graduated from the University of Southern California in 1992, the country was in the midst of a deep recession. Consequently, despite having worked two full-time jobs for all four years of college, starting a new campus newspaper and maintaining a straight A average, I only had two job offers. The first was from Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Los Angeles working as a rental agent. The second was selling display advertising for the Kansas City Star. I chose the latter because it was owned by Capital Cities/ABC, which owned ABC television which, to me, was cool (I was 21 years old and still thought I knew what was or wasn’t cool). Additionally, it was at least tangentially related to my field of study, business and marketing. In reality, it was a commission-based sales job going door to door in Wyandotte County, Kansas, and asking small business owners to advertise. What no one told me before I took the job was that the Kansas City Star wasn’t exactly well liked in those parts. Actually, it was borderline despised. But I stuck with it, built some relationships, kept showing up over and over and over again, and eventually had great success.

A few years later, my father passed away and my fiancée dumped me, and I was sort of a mess. So, I quit my job in newspaper sales, packed up my car, and drove down to Florida with no money and not a lot of prospects. I ran out of gas (and cash) in Boca Raton, Florida. That was February 1995. I’ve been here ever since.

Later that year, I opened up JBA Advertising which later became William Harris Advertising which later became Brown Parker & DeMarinis Advertising which later became BPD Healthcare. So, basically, over the past 30 years I’ve had two jobs – selling newspaper advertising and running this company in one way, shape or form.

The turning point in the journey was in the early 2000s when I decided that BPD would become a healthcare marketing company that specialized in hospitals/health systems. For me, I was always seeking higher purpose in my life’s work. Yet, at the same time, I really wanted to be financially successful, or at least comfortable. I felt this pathway would give me a shot at doing great work for people and companies that made a difference in the world. And, at the same time, I would be able to put food on the table and have a decent lifestyle. I never thought that one day BPD would become one of the most successful healthcare marketing and communications firms in the country. But, make no mistake, the journey hasn’t been linear. Like any business, we’ve had to continuously reinvent ourselves – especially now, as AI, insourcing, and economic pressure are fundamentally reshaping the healthcare landscape.

As of this interview, our company is evolving to better meet the needs of our clients, transforming from purely marketing communications into a fully integrated strategic advisory, marcomm and data firm built to deliver transformative, bankable growth to leading healthcare brands.

What was your vision for creating BPD, and how do you define its mission?

The original vision was to bring Madison Avenue caliber creative work to an industry that was desperately underserved. That vision was part and parcel of our mission to help people live their best, healthiest lives possible. Today, our mission really remains unchanged. What has evolved is how we work with healthcare brands to make that a reality. The business of healthcare – especially as it relates to health systems – faces tremendous headwinds: margin compression, rising consumer choice (and expectations), broken physician referral systems, lower payor reimbursements…the list goes on.

Against that backdrop, most health systems currently have a very fragmented, archaic approach to identifying, capturing and optimizing for growth. We are looking to change that, with one integrated system that drives market share through an AI-instrumented growth engine that aligns all audiences into a single operating system: workforce, physicians, donors, payors, community, and patients.

Will you provide an overview of BPD’s services and capabilities?

BPD is one of one in our space. It is the only health system strategic growth partner that delivers world-class capabilities across strategic advisory, marketing communications, and data and intelligence.

Strategic Advisory: We partner with healthcare organizations to uncover opportunities, navigate challenges, and build strategies rooted in data, insight, and real-world impact. Whether focused on business growth, organizational planning, or marketing and communications, our approach ensures every move is intentional, measurable, and aligned with broader organizational goals. Our aim is to help our clients create clear pathways for meaningful impact within their organizations.

Data and Intelligence: Our proprietary data and intelligence platforms leverage patient claims data, consumer and physician intelligence, and predictive modeling to identify and predict where growth actually exists – often before it’s visible in traditional reporting. And then we track what’s working, what’s not, and optimize our clients’ investments.

Activation and Execution: We translate that intelligence into actionable, fully integrated programs that impact employer brand, workforce engagement, internal and external branding/ reputation, service line growth, physician alignment, community impact, and improved payor reimbursements.

What makes us different is that these aren’t separate services. They are combined into a single, powerful system.

How important has it been to infuse hospitality principles into BPD’s culture?

Maya Angelou once said, “People will forget what you said. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” We agree and that’s one of the main reasons we partnered with the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center ten years ago to embed hospitality principles into our culture.

As important, we’ve continued to operationalize those principles into everything we do. Our daily stand-ups. How we hire and evaluate BPDers. How we script client visits. Even how we appear in video calls. It’s all part of The BPD Way. In an AI-driven world, we’ve been at the forefront of innovation yet, at the same time, we’ve continued to practice our own brand of service excellence. We don’t believe that it’s pure coincidence or luck that many of our client relationships span decades.

Will you highlight BPD’s AI-driven data platform, and the impact it has made on delivering precision marketing solutions with proven ROI for leading health systems?

Historically, healthcare marketing relied heavily on lagging indicators – utilization reports, market share data, retrospective analytics. By the time you see the data, the opportunity was already gone. We’ve built a system that combines national claims data, consumer and physician signals, and predictive modeling to identify growth opportunities in real time – sometimes identifying hundreds of millions of dollars in service line opportunity within a single market. From there, we connect that intelligence directly to action – targeting the highest propensity, highest value patient audiences, aligning physician networks, optimizing media, and continuously measuring performance. This system – which we call Precision 2.0 – has really set a new bar in the industry for ROI.

The next evolution of our data platform includes what we call the Institutional Trust Index – a framework that measures how trust behaves for individual healthcare brands, and how it correlates directly to market share. That’s where this is going: not just measuring activity, but proving causality between strategy, trust, and growth.

How do you focus your efforts leading BPD?

Right now, I’m focused on delivering what the healthcare market has said it needs to win: a new, more powerful, systematic approach to growth in all of its forms. That means not only working collaboratively with our clients to pilot these systems in the real world, but also partnering with my leadership teams to socialize and operationalize a really big vision across our enterprise.

How critical has it been to build the BPD team?

We have built best-in-class strategy, data and technology platforms, but ultimately you need really great people managing those systems and seeing around corners for our clients. So, we look for industry thought leaders who are exceptional and brilliant. But that’s only half the equation. If you aren’t a great human being who is great to work with (inside and outside our walls), you won’t make it as a BPDer. This is something we don’t see changing as we look to the future.

What do you feel are the keys to effective leadership?

I think there are many effective styles of leadership, but I try to follow a pretty simple playbook:

•Vision – Give the team a big vision that they can see themselves in;

•Honesty – Tell the truth, even if it’s not what people always want to hear;

•Humanity – Being a good leader starts with being a good person;

•Urgency – Life is short, none of us can afford to wait;

•Morality – The best people look for leaders with a strong moral compass;

•Deliver – Do what you say you are going to do.

What advice do you offer to young people beginning their careers?

My advice to younger professionals typically centers around four core themes:

Show up In Real Life – Relationships aren’t built over the phone or on Zoom links. Real, lasting relationships are built in person. Find ways, excuses even, to be in person whenever possible.

Be A+ always – Whatever your field, do your job in an A+ manner. That means whether it’s an email, a presentation, the food you bring in for the company pot luck – it should be the best it can be. Because how you do anything is how you do everything.

Stand by your word – Do what you say you’re going to do. It sounds simple, but it’s rare.

Create an AI co-agent – Whatever your job, create an AI co-agent that will help you process issues, go faster, perform at an elevated level and take the mundane tasks off of your plate so you can spend more time developing high-leverage skills.