Fierce industry competition has forced healthcare marketers to stretch the boundaries of where they'll go to build consumer awareness and generate interest.
The old standbys: TV, radio and newspapers are being re-evaluated and sometimes overlooked by marketers in an effort to hit target audiences where they least expect it.
For the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle and the Massachusetts Department of Health, marketing innovation is being realized with a city bus and the silver screen.
The Cutest Little Baby Face
How do you generate new excitement about a 69-year-old community healthcare facility? This was the marketing challenge Swedish Medical Center's Ballard Family Childbirth Center posed to their agency, Brems Eastman & Partners (Seattle). With a limited budget of $100,000 (all of which was used) and a narrow geographic base, one of the key objectives of the Ballard campaign was to find a highly targeted vehicle that would be an exciting attention-getter for this isolated port community in Seattle.
"We were limited with the vehicles we could use for this geographic area, TV and metro newspapers would have given us too much waste. They wouldn't allow us to zero in on the five-mile radius of this Seattle neighborhood," said Sue Eastman, the agency's vice president.
After kicking around a number of grassroots media options like 3-D billboards and ads in the community's mildly read newspapers, Ballard and the agency ultimately brainstormed the striking "Ballard Baby Bus" campaign. Metro bus #3038 hit the streets May 1, plastered with larger-than-life, full-color depictions of 11 babies born at the Ballard Family Childbirth Center within the last year.
For the next six months, the eight- to nine-foot-tall babies - peering inside and outside the windows, lounging around, waving from the back and sides of the bus and even smiling from the roof -will remind the community that "Ballard's Having Bundles of Babies."
Sally Wright, communications manager for the Swedish Medical Center, concedes that the campaign essentially "told people what they already knew," but the center needed key positioning-focused marketing to keep it top-of-mind in the community since there are a few other birthing center options in the area.
This six-month promotion is the first of its kind by any local hospital in Seattle and is expected to reach about 206,000 people, five times a month in the Seattle community, according to the Washington Transit Authority.
The campaign generated extra mileage on May 17, when the real-life babies, their families and Swedish/Ballard employees walked alongside the bus throughout the streets of downtown Ballard in this year's Norwegian Constitution Day Parade. Ads placed in local community newspapers round out the promotion and PR efforts have already achieved local TV and metro newspaper coverage, said Sally Davis, R.N., clinical director of the Ballard center.
Anti-smoking Message Heats Up
The Massachusetts Department of Health (MDH) and its agency Houston Herstak Favat in Boston, are the first to exploit the same medium that undermines its anti-smoking efforts with glamorous cigarette-puffing Hollywood types - the silver screen. "John Travolta and Winona Ryder do much more harm than the Marlboro Man or Joe Camel," said Dr. Greg Connolly, MDH's director of the tobacco control program.
Since March, movie-goers in 81 theaters have been seeing messages that range from the provocative to slapstick. The $45,000 campaign (which includes three spots), targets teenagers and aims to neutralize smoking messages that are so common in film.
Starting with a heavy-hitting profile of a 26-year-old smoker who needed a lung transplant, the spot hammered home the point that this young smoker who wanted to look older and more mature gets her wish: she looks aged beyond her years.
The campaign then switched gears to its current running second spot that spoofs the cool rustic sophistication of the Marlboro Man by having him light up not only his cigarette but in the process his pants, too, on horseback. The copy quips, "There's a moment in every smoker's life when you see more clearly than ever, that cigarettes have got the better of you."
The third "Twilight Zone"-inspired spot, called "Epiphany," features a man on an airplane who desperately yearns for a smoke and looks out the window to see a mysterious man smoking on the wing. Clearly spooked by what only he can see, the traveler pledges to quit.
Getting theater chains to agree to run these commercials continues to be an uphill challenge because of the politically-charged implications for the movie industry, according to Robin Richards, one of the agency's account executives on MDH.
To date, Sony Theaters is the only chain that has agreed to run the spots; the state's other chains, General Cinema, National Amusements and Loew's are still hesitant, citing that Warner and Disney have policies against theater advertising before their movies. Even Sony will not show the spots before movies distributed by Warner or Disney.
Although cinema advertising is 20 to 25 percent more costly than TV, Dr. Connolly is convinced it's worth it. Reaching a quarter-of-a-million people each week, the Sony theaters deliver an uncluttered commercial environment with a captive audience that allows MDH's anti-smoking message to go head-on with the increasing number of smoking images in the movies.
The campaign, which is scheduled to run through the end of June, has spawned interest from anti-smoking groups in other states. The Los Angeles county health department and its ad agency are considering a theater campaign. And LA's American Lung Association (ALA) has already laid the groundwork with a spot shown recently at an independent film festival that shows a young mother smoking while giving her baby a bottle. Anti-smoking groups in Arizona are also looking to create their own cinema campaigns.
(Swedish's Ballard Family Childbirth Center, 206/386-2748; Brems Eastman & Partners, 206/MDH, 617/534-5395; Houston Herstek Favat, 617/375-7239)