Joseph M. Garraffo
Joe Garraffo
President, Practice Strategy & Growth at Vitality Medical Marketing Group. Co-founder of Efferent Media.
What I do
I study how patients search, choose, and buy elective medicine. That sounds academic. In practice it means I spend most of my week inside ad accounts, call logs, CRMs and consult records for hair restoration and aesthetic practices, trying to work out which of the things we did actually produced a patient.
It is a harder question than it sounds. A hair transplant is a five figure decision that a patient researches for six to eighteen months before a practice ever learns their name. By the time they call, the click that started it is long gone from every report that would have counted it. Most of the arguments I have at work are two systems disagreeing about the same number, and most of what I write on this site starts because one of those arguments turned out to have a real answer.
The through line across twenty-odd years is the same one: figuring out what people are actually looking for, and what it costs to be the answer.
Where this started
I studied at Seminole State College of Florida from 1995 to 1997. In 1999 I enrolled at the Hendriks Institute, which my parents paid for the way they had for my brother and sister. That is the single decision this whole career sits on. I graduated in 2000 and was teaching there the same year, which is how I learned that explaining something is a different skill from doing it, and the more valuable one.
I have a career, a wife, a family and a story because of that year.
Newsday, and what a newsroom taught me about search
I joined Newsday in 2002 as an interactive project manager and stayed six years. It happened to be the exact window when search stopped being optional for publishers, and Tribune, which owned Newsday at the time, had to work that out across a lot of newsrooms at once.
I sat on the founding committee that brought SEO to news desks across the Tribune family. Organic traffic at Newsday rose 41% inside two years. Across Tribune Interactive, search traffic went from roughly 10 million visits in 2006 to just under 14 million by 2008. The piece I am still proudest of is smaller and less glamorous: I built and taught the program that trained Newsday copy editors to write headlines that worked for a reader and for a search engine at the same time. Copy editors are not marketers, and they are right to be suspicious of anyone who shows up telling them how to write. Getting that program adopted was a persuasion problem, not a technical one.
The other thing I remember is February 2007. Anna Nicole Smith died, and we coordinated coverage across the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun to funnel search demand toward Newsday.com. Inside thirty minutes it became the highest trafficked day in the history of the site.
Awards and recognition
Six multimedia projects I was responsible for on the Newsday Interactive team were nominated for and won ONA, Pulitzer and BOLI awards. These are team awards and I want to be precise about my part in them: I ran the interactive production and the delivery infrastructure, not the reporting or the art.
- Walt Handelsman, 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. The first Pulitzer ever awarded for animation. Handelsman taught himself Flash in 2006; my team built the Flash publishing and delivery infrastructure that put those animated cartoons in front of readers on Newsday.com.
- Fire Alarm Project, 2005. Newsday Big Sunday investigative pullout.
- Saving Bobby, 2006. Newsday Big Sunday investigative pullout.
- Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium virtual tours. I went on site with the camera rig and shot the 360-degree behind-the-scenes tours myself. Both assets are long gone, which is its own lesson about the web.
- amNewYork Prospect Park special.
Efferent Media’s own bio describes this period as projects “nominated twice for Pulitzer Prizes.” The fuller version is the list above: six projects, several award bodies, one of them a Pulitzer win for the cartoonist whose work my team published.
The book
In 2004 I co-authored Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Advanced for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickPro Guide with Russell Chun, published by Peachpit Press. ISBN 0321213416. I wrote it while I was teaching Flash and ActionScript, which is the only reason it is any good: every chapter had already failed in front of a room of students before it went in the book.
It is long out of print, and the technology it covers is dead. I still think it is the most useful thing I have ever written, because writing a step-by-step book forces you to admit exactly which steps you had been hand-waving.
Teaching and speaking
Teaching came before the agency and never really stopped. Hendriks Institute from 2000. Corporate Flash and ActionScript training after that. A Flash user group I started inside Tribune that spanned properties in several cities. The SEO headline program in the Newsday newsroom. Conference and college talks along the way.
I am available for conference sessions, panels, podcasts, webinars and association presentations on search behavior, patient acquisition, and medical advertising compliance. What I bring is data from a real fleet of practices rather than a slide of best practices. If you organize something and think there is a fit, email me.
What people I have worked with say
I have found Joe to be tremendously knowledgeable in his field of work, creative, and open to ideas and advice that may be new or contrary to his current thinking. He also has a great deal of integrity and takes pride in his work, and is generally just a fine person to know. I am happy to recommend him enthusiastically, and without hesitation, to any company needing someone with his expertise.
Joe played an instrumental role in a key project we worked on together at Newsday, enabling and teaching copy editors to write SEO-friendly headlines for Newsday’s Internet sites. Joe’s understanding of Search Engine Optimization strategies and tools proved invaluable to the project, as did his organization and communication skills. The project was a major success, and Joe’s efforts played a critical part in making that happen.
Joe is great with Flash; he worked on a series of award-winning projects at Newsday. He also led our SEO/SEM efforts and devoted many hours to keeping up with the latest developments in this field.
His expertise and knowledge of the inner workings of the internet and creative ways to increase SEO marketing have shown my clients a tremendous result. His abilities to not only DO but to TEACH are impeccable.
My firm has had the pleasure of having Joe teach Flash and ActionScript on several occasions for our clients. Each time, the client has been delighted with Joe’s style, expertise, and willingness to customize the training to their needs.
These are LinkedIn recommendations, quoted as written. There are thirteen on the profile; these five cover the range.
Experience
- 2025 — present
President, Practice Strategy & Growth
Vitality Medical Marketing Group
Hair restoration, plastic surgery, facial plastics, dermatology and aesthetics. No e-commerce, no restaurants, no law firms. The work is patient acquisition end to end: compliant medical advertising, the nurture window between a form fill and a booked consult, and the front-desk conversation that decides whether either one mattered.
- 2022 — 2025
VP of Practice Relations
Hair Loss Marketing, Inc.
Boutique and concierge hair restoration practices. This is where the attribution problem got serious, because a hair transplant is a five-figure decision a patient researches for a year before anyone in the practice hears their name.
- 2011 — present
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
Incorporated August 2011. Full time from October 2012, which is the day the salaried job ended. It started at my dining room table with my wife and our first hire, who brought her infant with her. Same building in Lindenhurst ever since, expanded inside it three times.
- 2011 — 2012
Director of Search & Interactive Strategy
Long Island Press / Morey Organization
Same title, different masthead.
- 2008 — 2010
Director of Search & Interactive Strategy
Long Island Radio Group
Owned the branded web properties group and built yourli.com. Behavioral targeting, dayparting, geo-targeting, multivariate testing, and enough grid-locked phrase and exact match to learn what paid search actually costs. Organic drove more than 47% of traffic to the site from launch.
- 2002 — 2008
Interactive Project Manager
Newsday
Six years in a newsroom during the exact window when search stopped being optional for publishers. Sat on the founding committee that brought SEO to Tribune newsrooms nationally, and built the training program that taught Newsday copy editors to write headlines that worked for readers and for Google at the same time.
- 2000 — 2004
Instructor, Flash and ActionScript
Hendriks Institute and corporate clients
Graduated in 2000 and was teaching there the same year. Later taught Flash and ActionScript to corporate teams, and founded an internal Flash user group at Tribune that spanned properties in multiple cities.
Education
- Hendriks Institute, 1999 to 2000. Taught there from 2000.
- Seminole State College of Florida, 1995 to 1997.
Outside the work
I live on Long Island with my wife Nicole, who runs operations at Vitality. Two grown kids. Lifelong Mets fan, which I recommend to nobody. I cook, and stuffed artichokes or barbecue is the answer to most questions. Favorite movies are Fight Club and Pink Floyd: The Wall. Favorite vacation is a lake with mountains behind it.
One more thing, because it is relevant to the work rather than a fun fact: I had a hair transplant myself. I wanted to know what the process we market actually feels like from the chair, from the consult through the months of waiting. It changed how I think about the copy, the follow-up, and the pace of the whole thing.