Most marketing in senior living looks the same from a distance. A handsome building at golden hour. A couple in matching cardigans laughing at something offscreen. A phone number in a friendly font. It is designed to reassure, and it reassures no one, because everyone can tell it was built to sell a thing people would rather not think about. David Cygan spent a decade deciding to do the opposite.
Cygan is the Chief Marketing Officer of Brookdale Senior Living, the largest operator of senior living communities in the United States - 543 communities across 41 states, home to roughly 46,000 residents. It is a big surface to speak for. His answer to that scale was to make the message smaller: point the camera at one resident, in one apartment, on one ordinary day, and let them talk.
The clearest example is a web series called Make It Mine. The premise is almost too simple to pitch in a boardroom. A professional interior designer walks into a resident's apartment and, in a single day, turns a senior living space into a personalized home. Where the books go. Which chair faces the window. The photographs that finally come out of the box. There is no script and there are no actors. There is a person deciding what home means to them, on camera, and that turns out to be enough.
The numbers behind that small idea are not small. Across its run, Make It Mine has generated 57 million impressions, 24 million engagements, and 32 million video views, with more than 67,000 hours of watch time - the kind of figures that usually belong to entertainment, not to a category most people research only when they have to.
A long way from selling long distance
Cygan did not start in senior care. He earned a bachelor's in advertising from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later an executive MBA from Georgia State, and he spent the early part of his career in categories with nothing obvious in common - telecommunications, security monitoring, visual systems technology. He was Director of Marketing and Advertising at AT&T. He was Vice President of Marketing at Kindred at Home, the home health company now known as CenterWell.
Look at that resume from the right angle and a through-line appears. Each stop asked him the same question in a slightly harder form: how do you market something people find genuinely difficult to think about? Long-distance bills. Home security. And then, at Kindred, care that arrives in your house because a parent can no longer manage alone. By the time he joined Brookdale in 2014 as Senior Vice President of Marketing, the question had reached its sharpest version.
The promotion to Chief Marketing Officer came in October 2019. The remit widened: marketing, connection center sales, public relations, and associate communications - the internal voice as well as the external one. He also serves as an independent board director for Fidelity Memorial Group, a seat that keeps him close to the business side of the sector he markets.
Marketing to the person doing the worrying
The insight that seems to organize Cygan's work is that in senior living, the buyer and the resident are often not the same person. A daughter does the research at midnight. She reads the reviews, tours the buildings, carries the guilt and the logistics. The mother moves in. If you only speak to the person who will live there, you miss the person actually making the decision.
So Brookdale built something for her. The Grey Take is a podcast aimed squarely at the adult children supporting aging parents - real conversations, expert voices, and unfiltered stories about one of the more complicated and emotional seasons a family goes through. It lives on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and it is not a sales pitch. It is closer to a service: help the person carrying the weight before you ask them for anything.
"These awards validate our commitment to creating content that builds lasting relationships with audiences through authentic storytelling."
David Cygan, CMO, Brookdale Senior Living
That approach has collected a shelf of recognition. Make It Mine earned multiple honors at the 47th Annual Telly Awards - competing, in the same field, against entries from Paramount and Warner Bros. - and won a 2026 Argentum Best of the Best award. In 2025, Brookdale picked up two Aspect Marketing & Advertising Awards: one for The Grey Take in the podcast category, and one for Make It Mine in social media.
Why smaller went bigger
There is a quiet contradiction at the center of the strategy, and it is the part worth stealing. Cygan is responsible for one of the largest marketing surfaces in the sector, and his instinct was to zoom all the way in. Not a national campaign that speaks to everyone and lands on no one, but a single resident deciding where the photographs go. Specificity, it turns out, is what makes the thing travel. Fifty-seven million impressions grew out of one apartment at a time.
It is a discipline more than a trick. It would be easier, and safer, to keep making the golden-hour building and the matching cardigans. Those never get a designer arguing with a resident about a rug. They also never move anyone. Cygan's decade at Brookdale reads like a long argument that honesty about a hard subject is not a liability to manage but the only thing that actually earns trust from a family standing at the edge of a big decision.
"We are honored to receive two Aspect Awards this year. These recognitions reflect the strategic importance of our marketing initiatives and the meaningful connection they create with our audiences."
David Cygan
The work keeps going. Make It Mine has run six seasons, with the latest arriving in February, and the residents keep redecorating, and the daughters keep listening to the podcast at midnight. None of it looks like a brochure. That, more than any single award, is the point Cygan has been making all along - from the University of Illinois advertising desk to a corner office in Brentwood, Tennessee, where the biggest name in senior living decided the most persuasive voice it had was the one already living there.