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Actionable
Takeaways

Start internal, always:

Holly's team spends significant time on internal narrative adoption before going external. As she puts it: "You have to go out, start with your own channels first. And in particular, start with your internal channels." If your executives aren't wearing the narrative, it's already failing.

A narrative should fit on a single page:

Holly's "corporate narrative placemat" philosophy cuts through the bloat of 30-page messaging documents. If you can't articulate who you are, what you do, why you exist, and your value on one page, you haven't done the work yet. Test it by asking: "As a human being, am I going to say these words out loud?"

Optimize for AI, not just journalists:

Included Health conducts LLM audits—literally asking ChatGPT and Gemini about their company to see what surfaces. Then they work backward to strengthen presence in sources AI trusts: peer-reviewed journals, Harvard Business Review, Wikipedia. Holly's advice: "We're thinking about not only how do we win hearts and minds, but how do we win hearts and machines."

Do less, better:

When asked for one piece of advice, Holly didn't hesitate: "Do less, better." The era of throwing thick clip books on tables is over. Quality of narrative execution beats volume of output every time.

Build founder trust through curiosity, not credentials:

Working with founders requires recognizing you're dealing with "their child or their baby." Holly's approach: be curious, listen deeply, don't claim to have all answers, and look for moments to prove value and "offer a little delight along the way."

Conversation
Highlights

 

Included Health serves a third of the Fortune 100, delivering personalized, all-in-one healthcare to millions. But breaking through in a crowded healthcare technology market required more than great services—it demanded a narrative sharp enough to cut through noise and flexible enough to scale across every channel. In this episode of The Narrative, Holly Spring, VP Corporate Marketing & Communications at Included Health, reveals how she builds corporate narratives that stick, navigates the shift from agency clip books to AI-powered media landscapes, and transforms founders’ visions into stories that resonate with both journalists and language models.

 

Topics Discussed

  • The “corporate narrative placemat” approach: condensing your entire story into a single page that guides everything from press releases to creative
  • Testing narratives through competitive audits and real-world usage—Holly’s team studied brands like Airbnb and Uber alongside healthcare competitors
  • Working with founders: building trust, managing strong opinions, and knowing when to listen versus when to push back
  • Earned media in the modern landscape: tracking individual reporters, prioritizing quality over clip book volume, and building relationships that matter
  • The “hearts and machines” strategy: conducting LLM audits to understand how AI surfaces your company, then optimizing content for both human journalists and AI systems
  • Why communications should never sit in a silo—the difference between being a press release factory and shaping corporate strategy
  • Managing narrative rollout across internal channels first, then external owned, earned, paid, and social