There is a particular kind of quiet in a clinic waiting room. The television is on. Nobody chose the channel. A person flips through a magazine from last winter and looks up, because looking up is what one does when waiting. Most advertisers see dead time. Todd Muggerud saw a delivery system.
The idea began with an uncomfortable comparison. As KAT & Company tells it, a young Muggerud worked in local news and became friendly with an Indigenous elder. Both men had diabetes. Their diagnoses were similar; their access to care and useful education was not. Muggerud could see the gap without needing a focus group. The elder's experience changed the direction of his work.
KAT had started in Bismarck in 1989. Over time it became a marketing company, a video shop, a web developer, an app builder, an e-learning producer, and something more peculiar: an owner of the channels through which its clients' messages travel. GoodHealthTV now places short, culturally relevant health programming in tribal and federal health facilities, schools, and community centers. The company's 2024 account put it in more than 736 locations across 36 states.
The first thing that failed was reach
Public-health communication has a habit of confusing availability with arrival. A brochure exists, therefore people have seen it. A video was posted, therefore the intended audience encountered it. An ad recorded a million impressions, therefore something happened. KAT's wager is that each “therefore” hides the real problem.
In rural places, media habits are fragmented and broadband can be uneven. In Indigenous communities, a generic campaign may arrive without the language, faces, humor, or context that makes it feel meant for the viewer. Sensitive subjects make the distance worse. Suicide prevention, sexually transmitted infections, addiction, diabetes, and cancer screening are not improved by louder stock photography.
KAT calls its method Culture Connect. Strip away the trademark polish and it is a practical sequence: understand the audience, make something appropriate to the setting, then choose distribution that the audience actually uses. The company employs Indigenous creatives and a national freelancer network for Native Reach. Living Local applies the same logic to North Dakota towns through waiting-room displays and community apps. In 2024, KAT reported 121 Living Local displays in 83 communities, plus 86 Living Local apps and 24 Native Reach apps.
“Many communities in the Living Local app network are among some of our hardest-to-reach.”Amy Keller, Women’s Way
A click is pleasant. A screening is better.
The most persuasive KAT case studies do not end with a mood board. An anonymous-tip campaign for North Dakota Health and Human Services reported an 18 percent rise in total app downloads and a 56 percent rise in tip submissions against the comparable three-month period a year earlier. Downloads continued upward after the campaign. The work separated parents from teenagers because the two groups had different reasons to act, then matched each with its own message.
For Women’s Way, the state breast and cervical cancer early-detection program, KAT combined testimonials and motion graphics with paid search, social ads, online video, broadcast airtime, GoodHealthTV, and Living Local notifications. The program reported a 25.85 percent increase in enrollment, a 10.35 percent increase among Hispanic women, and a 12.5 percent increase in new screenings among Native American women.
The range is revealing. KAT helped the North Dakota courts replace aging guardian training with a learning system, two full courses, three mini-courses, and more than 15 videos. It built a Menominee Nation app that centralizes tribal news and urgent push notifications. For the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, it created a storefront where clinics and advocates could order health-education materials for free; more than 745,000 items were ordered. For rural fire departments, KAT supplied local leaders with ready-made recruitment tools and kept phoning stations to count results. More than 3,000 people volunteered across four years.
The formats differ because the job differs. This sounds obvious. It is also where many campaigns surrender to convenience.
The agency, priced in public
KAT does not publish a general rate card, and its large health campaigns are not publicly priced. One municipal proposal does offer a clean window. In September 2025, KAT proposed a website for Wahpeton's Southern Prairie Activity & Recreation Center. The first-year total was $17,536.73.
The number is less interesting than its anatomy. Discovery, sitemap, wireframes, build, migration, design, search setup, testing, training, hosting, maintenance, and reporting sit on one piece of paper. Technical support outside regular maintenance was proposed at $175 an hour. A much older public reference, from a 2016 South Dakota legislative discussion, priced an annual GoodHealthTV school subscription at $4,000. These are snapshots, not current universal prices. They show how the model earns money: project fees, media and network subscriptions, software and app work, hosting, maintenance, airtime, and support.
Copy the sequence, not the television set
A nonprofit does not need 700 screens to borrow KAT's best idea. It needs to stop treating distribution as the chore after creative approval. The channel belongs in the first meeting.
- Begin with a moment, not a demographic. “Adults 35 to 64” is useful. “A woman already sitting in a clinic and thinking about her health” is useful in a different, more actionable way.
- Separate audiences that behave differently. Parents and teenagers did not receive the same ND Tip argument. Shared geography did not mean shared motivation.
- Make culture part of production. Put people with lived context inside scripting, imagery, review, and delivery rather than asking them to bless a finished campaign.
- Pair reach with an observable action. Count enrollments, course completions, materials ordered, app use, tips submitted, screenings, or recruits.
- Budget for the unphotogenic work. Screens go offline. Apps need updates. Websites need training. Fulfillment needs boxes. The campaign continues after launch day.
There are limits. This approach fits messages that benefit from trust, repetition, and a clearly defined community. It is less convincing for a one-off national consumer launch with no local partners, for a client unwilling to adapt creative after community feedback, or when the desired action cannot be measured. Owned distribution is an advantage only while the network is maintained and the audience still finds the setting credible. A screen nobody watches is merely furniture with a power bill.
KAT's competitive set is therefore awkwardly broad: ad agencies, video studios, WordPress shops, e-learning vendors, app developers, and point-of-care media networks. A specialist may beat it at any single craft. KAT's argument is integration. One team can study the audience, build the creative, code the destination, buy conventional media, place the message on its own network, send the notification, fulfill the materials, and watch the system after everyone else has gone home.
That model grew out of what changed Todd Muggerud's mind all those years ago: two people could have the same disease and inhabit entirely different information systems. The creative was never the whole problem. Access was.