UChicago Medicine CMO Andrew Chang at Salesforce Connections!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

**John Wall** (0:15)
Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee, I'm John Wall. Today, our guest is Andrew Chang, he's the CMO of UChicago Medicine. He's going to talk to us about what's going on here at Salesforce Connections in Chicago.
Andrew, thanks for joining us.

**Andrew Chang** (0:27)
Thanks for having me.

**John Wall** (0:28)
All right, so we were joking before we got going that there is a 200 foot high billboard that has your face on it with your team.

**Andrew Chang** (0:36)
It's awkward.

**John Wall** (0:38)
It's hard to explain. It's fantastic.
I will probably use it as the artwork for the show. If you don't have a problem with that.

**Andrew Chang** (0:45)
No, no problem.

**John Wall** (0:46)
If PR is okay with that. Tell us about yourself. I guess, did you grow up as a little kid wanting to be CMO of a medical org or what happened?

**Andrew Chang** (0:56)
I grew up thinking and being told to think I was going to be a doctor since I was a very, very young child.
It is really weird that I'm in an academic medical center as a marketing guy, but not as a doctor. But I was pre-med. I graduated from college with a molecular and cell biology degree.
But I really didn't like it. And I actually really hated it. And it hated me back, just to be completely fair. And med school was not the path I was going to go. So I had my midlife crisis at the age of 20 pretty much, and was trying to figure out what I should do. My parents were suggesting computer science.
I enrolled in a couple computer science classes. Then my dad said, go to numbers, maybe try a math major. So I took a few math courses and nothing really stuck until some random person just suggested advertising and marketing. And I looked at it and said, well, looks fun, so I might as well try it. And did a case competition, did an internship, and then just completely just fell in love. But I wanted to just graduate college as fast as I possibly could. So what happened was, it was 2001, and I was working for a company that had this crazy idea, it was a startup, this crazy idea of categorizing websites and then measuring how much traffic goes to them and then selling that data. And eventually, that became Neilson Netratings. And they, you know, the.com bubble burst. So my offer unfortunately got rescinded. And I fell back on my major and did genomic research for two and a half, three years, which again, I really did not like. And that basically forced me to get focused on my life and go to business school and focus on marketing. And I spent most of my career actually in the airlines. And my dream job in business school, I took a class called database marketing. No one else really took it. And I remember just sitting there in class thinking, learning about frequent flyer programs and just thinking to myself, this is what I want to be when I grow up. I want to run frequent flyer programs. And three years later, I worked for an airline called Airtrain Airways, and I ended up running their frequent flyer program. And so I peaked really early.
You know, we got purchased by Southwest. I worked for Southwest for a little bit and then left the airline industry because it's so volatile. And worked for UPS, learned a lot there, and was in charge of their, at first, their automotive manufacturing and aerospace segment. And then ran their global small business and consumer segment. And then just did some more soul searching and ended up in healthcare. Not randomly, but fortuitously, because my mentor at the time just told me, you should meet this guy who's looking for someone with your skillset, knows digital, knows analytics. Healthcare marketing doesn't really have anything like that. And that began my healthcare journey at Piedmont Healthcare in 2016 So here I am now.

**John Wall** (4:21)
That's amazing. It's an amazing run though. I love to hear that story because it's so many different forces coming together, but and technology evolving to catch up to you. You know, you were there and now the tools are there and it's all come together.

**Andrew Chang** (4:35)
It's all come together. And from a Salesforce standpoint, I implemented Salesforce at AirTran in 2008
And this was my sixth implementation at UChicago Medicine. So I've been a big Salesforce fan since the early days.

**John Wall** (4:50)
That's okay.

**Andrew Chang** (4:50)