NICHOLAS J. ABRUZZO

PROFILE
Proven digital strategy, product & marketing professional with deep experience driving innovation in health/life sciences and education organizations — in both startups & corporations. Over the course of my career my teams have built & marketed award-winning digital products that grew engagement and revenue for millions of customers in the US and around the world.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 

abruzzo advisors - Principal, 2015 - Present
Providing digital strategy, marketing, and product consulting services to healthcare, publishing, pharma/biotech, and online education clients in the US and Europe. Recent engagements have included:

Horizon, Director, Digital Field Enablement 2020 – Present
Leading the development of strategies to optimize the identification, prioritization, implementation and impact of digital solutions to empower the sales and field force. Portfolio includes Veeva, PARC (Salesforce), Teledetailing, EMR Strategy plus driving innovation through piloting emerging field enablement solutions.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital – Director Digital Strategy, 2020
Providing strategic advising to Kettle - an AI IoT company, which helps teams reduce distractions, improve focus, and achieve better overall performance.

Kettle.Ai – Advisor, 2019-Present
Providing strategic advising to Kettle - an AI IoT company, which helps teams reduce distractions, improve focus, and achieve better overall performance.

Shortest Track – Product Management & Marketing
Shortest Track is an artificial intelligence (AI) SaaS startup company with a novel product that helps enterprises build, share, operationalize and syndicate AI designed to grow enterprise margins and efficiency in healthcare, logistics and retail industries.
- Directed brand user experience (UX) strategy, including product UX design patterns and visual design.
- Led brand strategy and developed company positioning used by the salesforce to articulate value proposition.
- Developed the “where to play” target segmentation strategy by identifying high potential sectors that could immediately benefit from data science.
- Orchestrated a marketing strategy that generated hundreds of high profile and high potential sales leads.
- Led the Company’s product roadmap by identifying key features and benefits to enable clients to understand and use AI to drive mission critical initiatives.

Tribes – Founder & Chief Product Officer
Tribes was a next generation, augmented reality social media mobile platform.
- Created product design and business plan for a mobile based social media platform that would leverage augmented reality to foster face-to-face connections to help address the epidemic of loneliness, which affects half of US adults, particularly Generation Z.

Dossier Solutions – Product Marketing Strategy
Dossier is a Norway-based education SaaS company serving clients in healthcare, aviation, and energy verticals.
- Designed brand and comprehensive go-to-market product strategy for the US.
- Analyzed competitive landscape & identified key product differentiators for health systems.
- Built market segmentation and sizing analysis based on revenue potential.
- Created pricing strategy & business model to maximize revenue growth and sustainable profitability.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital
Director, Digital Initiatives & Strategy - 2020-Present
Leading digital strategy for Arizona’s premier children’s hospital.
-Orchestrated the multi-channel web-based digital response to COVID-19
-Drove the strategy and execution of the first ever blog, Bright Futures, to elevate awareness of the breadth and depth of Phoenix Children’s expertise in caring for children.
-Developed a new experience strategy for the home page to improve usability and engagement with key messaging.

American Medical Association  -
Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing - 2009-2016
Reported to the CMO & CIO and led a large interdisciplinary team that developed and executed strategies to evolve AMA’s digital platforms, which engage millions of constituents annually. Portfolio included all websites, microsites, online store, web apps, and Intranet. Team included disciplines from marketing ux design, analytics, project management, QA & software engineering.  
- Improved site usability, which increased physician satisfaction every year for five years.
- Grew site traffic from 10M to 16M visits using SEO & digital syndication techniques.
- Increased click thru rate of the AMA weekly email newsletter, sent to 300k+ healthcare professionals, by 25%.
- Implemented A/B testing, which increased the top online product page conversion by 65%.
- Developed initial social strategy that earned AMA one of the highest influence scores among entire health vertical; as a result, today the AMA has over
1 million followers across multiple social media channels.
- Established many firsts at the AMA including its first consumer mobile app, SMS text marketing, online community boards, social media, Agile Project Management and a total cost of ownership analysis for digital technology investments.
- Consolidated five different login solutions into one enterprise SSO app, which markedly improved user experience and enabled the growth of registered email accounts by 175k users.

Talecris Biotherapeutics Inc. -
Associate Director, Global eMarketing - 2006-2009
Recruited by Cerberus Capital Management and reported to the Director of Product Management. Responsible for developing and executing global digital strategies within strict regulatory guidelines to increase reach and engagement for portfolio of brands that treat both rare and common disease. Role evolved through tenure to focus on driving new, high potential leads for the salesforce. 
- Orchestrated all digital marketing strategies and tactics including eDetailing, and email promotions; Expanded brand reach by engaging over 20,000 physicians, generating over 1,000 new leads, improving likelihood to prescribe Prolastin (50% vs 30% nationally) & generating $5M incremental LTV revenue.
- Helped develop the U.S. pulmonary product strategic plan, which helped substantially differentiate & grow Prolastin market share.
- Managed launch of five websites and grew traffic by 300% in six months; two of the sites won awards for excellence by the Web Marketing Association and MarComAwards.
- Led “Project Atlas” a million-dollar initiative that identified & implemented multiple digital solutions to drive efficacy of the commercial operations team.

Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago  -         
Manager, Corporate Communications & Website - 2002-2006
Reported to the CMO. Led a system-wide strategic planning process to chart out the evolution of RIC’s website, which required building consensus among board members and numerous constituencies.
- Implemented new ux design strategy to meet 503 and W3C guidelines, and ensure RIC’s website offered exceptional accessibility for people with disabilities.
- Implemented new WCMS, & migrating thousands of pages content.
- Led online advertising strategy to support recruitment, professional education services, and patient revenue goals, including campaigns in the Middle East. - Led the development of print and weekly e-newsletters; never missed a deadline in three years. During tenure employee satisfaction with internal communications grew by 5%.

West Suburban Health Care -
Manager, Planning & Marketing Director e-Care - 1997-2002 Reported to the VP Marketing & Planning, and was responsible planning, marketing and leading the strategy and development of all digital capabilities.
- Developed a business case to build a center for women's health; center created a robust and margin positive operation through multiple mergers and acquisitions.
- Led the design, launch and management of first two websites; sites reduced costs and generated $250k incremental revenue.
- Westsub.com offered innovative features, such as a secure physician to patient email system, and live chat help from nurses. As a result, the site was recognized for excellence by eHealthcare Strategy & Trends (Platinum Award - Best Site Design, Gold Award – Best Interactive Site) and awarded a Pinnacle Award for Excellence by the Illinois Society for Healthcare Marketing & Public Relations.

EDUCATION
Master of Arts in Communication Management
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles

Bachelor of Science in Media Studies
University of Illinois – Champaign-Urbana, Urbana, IL