Agency of the Year Winner StudioNorth on Synthetic Audiences, AI Agents & the Future of Healthcare Marketing

When generative AI first exploded onto the marketing scene, much of the conversation centered around one question: How can AI help us do what we already do…but faster? Write the blog faster. Create the social post faster. Summarize the research faster. But healthcare marketers are starting to move beyond that. For StudioNorth, Swaay.Health’s 2026 Agency of the Year, the more interesting question has become: What can AI help marketers do that they couldn’t do before? The shift from efficiency to insight is shaping much of the work happening at the agency today. StudioNorth has spent the past 18 months exploring how AI can help healthcare marketers better understand their audiences, pressure-test campaigns before they launch, evaluate how brands appear within large language models (LLMs), and even simulate how prospective buyers might respond to marketing experiences. It’s a significant evolution from where the industry was just a year ago. “We all probably started with, ‘How can AI help me do X faster?’” shared Caroline DeVore, Executive Director of Strategic Growth and Innovation at StudioNorth. “We’ve evolved as an industry…thinking differently about what AI enables us to do.” I sat down with Caroline and Lorraine McNeekin, Senior Director of Strategy, Healthcare at StudioNorth, to talk about winning Agency of the Year, how their approach to AI has evolved, what they’re learning from synthetic audiences, and why healthcare marketers may soon need to think very differently about who—or what—is discovering their brands. ## In This Conversation: - Why healthcare marketers are moving from AI pilots to AI performance. - How synthetic audiences can help marketers test campaigns, websites, messaging, and buyer journeys before going to market. - Why your next audience may include AI agents and large language models. - How StudioNorth is balancing AI innovation with human expertise, governance, and brand. - What healthcare marketers should be preparing for over the next 12–18 months. Watch the full conversation or listen to the podcast below, then keep reading for some of our biggest takeaways. ## Healthcare Marketing Is Moving From AI Pilots to Performance Healthcare marketers have spent the past 12–18 months experimenting with AI and learning where it can and can’t help. Now, Lorraine says the industry is moving **“from pilot to performance,”** with organizations looking for ways to build AI into real workflows and produce measurable value. And the biggest opportunity may not be doing the same work faster, but using AI to uncover insights marketers simply couldn’t access before. ## What If You Could Test Marketing Before It Ever Reached the Market? One of StudioNorth’s most interesting areas of experimentation is synthetic audiences, which can help marketers test messaging, creative, websites, buyer journeys, and even product names before they go to market. In one client website audit, StudioNorth compared feedback from synthetic audiences with real human participants and found the results were remarkably similar, opening the door to a level of audience testing that previously may have been too expensive or time-consuming for many marketing teams. Instead of waiting to see what worked after the campaign launches, marketers can start learning and adjusting **before they spend the first dollar.** ## Your Next Audience Might Not Be Human Consumers and buyers are increasingly asking AI tools to research products, compare options, and recommend brands, which means marketers may soon be marketing not only to people, but to the AI agents and LLMs helping those people make decisions. StudioNorth’s TOM Index (Top of Mind, Top of Model) examines how visible, distinctive, clear, and trustworthy brands appear across major AI models. As Caroline put it, your target audience is increasingly **“not just people. It’s agents. It’s LLMs.”** That makes AI visibility, brand consistency, schema, and discoverability an entirely new consideration for healthcare marketers. ## AI Forward. Human Led. Despite all the possibilities AI brings, StudioNorth is intentional about describing itself as **AI forward—not AI driven.** Their healthcare experts remain involved in reviewing AI-assisted work, challenging outputs, checking sources, and making sure everything that goes into market is accurate, appropriate, and true to the client’s brand. “We’re people first. We’re not AI first,” Caroline explained. **“We’re people first. We’re AI forward.”** ## Preparing for What Comes Next Over the next 12–18 months, Lorraine and Caroline expect AI to play a much bigger role in audience insights, personalization, brand discoverability, and the growth of AI agents that research and compare options on our behalf. For healthcare marketers, that means the opportunity isn’t simply to use AI to **do more,** it’s to use it to **know more before you act.** Understand your audience earlier. Test your assumptions sooner. See how AI understands your brand. And ultimately, make smarter marketing decisions before you’ve spent your campaign budget. That evolution is part of what earned StudioNorth its second Agency of the Year recognition, along with an Event of the Year win for its AI-focused event. And if our conversation is any indication, they’re not slowing down. As Caroline said near the end of our conversation, healthcare shouldn’t be thought of as an AI laggard anymore. Healthcare organizations are leaning forward, experimenting, innovating, and finding responsible ways to put these technologies to work. **Congratulations again to the entire StudioNorth team on being named Swaay.Health’s 2026 Agency of the Year. We can’t wait to see what you discover next.**