Campaign Spotlight: Children’s Effort Sees ‘Pawsitive’ Results

K. Hovnanian Children’s Hospital has a new doctor. Dr. Bernard wears green scrubs and a red stethoscope and has four fingers and floppy brown ears. By the way, he’s a dog.

The Neptune, NJ, hospital, which is part of Meridian Health System, created the cartoon character to increase brand awareness, develop relationships with young families, and build a database for ongoing communications for events and promotions. Judges for the HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards gave the organization the large hospital best in show award for the effort.

“Dr. Bernard is paired with our nurse educators at school and community events to demonstrate key messages about safety, nutrition, fitness, and respect,” the hospital wrote in its award submission form.

Read more about the Dr. Bernard campaign here.

2009 HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards Winners Posted

Healthcare advertising campaigns that set clear objectives, met or exceeded them, and showed positive ROI were honored at last week’s HealthLeaders Media Marketing Experience event in Chicago.

We’ve posted the complete list of winners online, and in coming weeks we’ll be featuring some of the winning campaigns in our e-newsletter’s “Spotlight” feature, in HealthLeaders magazine, and in the Healthcare Marketing Advisor newsletter—so stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can get a sneak peek with some highlights from the three campaigns our judges chose as best in show in today’s column.

Healthcare Marketing Leaders: What’s on Your Mind?

NOTE: the link to the survey is fixed now!

In the 2009 HealthLeaders Media Industry Survey, only 16% of healthcare marketing leaders said their efforts were “highly valued” by stakeholders organization-wide. Curious to know if that number has changed in the past year? Well, here’s your chance to participate: The 2010 marketing leaders survey is now open.

Our annual survey reveals a host of information about the healthcare industry in general and healthcare marketing in particular.

And in coming years we’ll be benchmarking questions, gathering information about what leaders consider their top priorities and how they assess of key marketing initiatives. We also have some new questions this year—so make sure to speak up and be heard. The survey of healthcare professionals should take about 14 minutes to complete. [Take the Survey Now]

(Belated) Greetings from Chicago, Wish You Were There

I was in Chicago last week for the HealthLeaders Media 2009 Marketing Experience and Hospital of the Future Now events. They took place at the Palmer House, a beautiful, grand old hotel that is apparently covered with some kind of impenetrable force field that foiled my every attempt to blog and Twitter during both events. But stay tuned for more coverage, including a full list of the 2009 marketing award winners, some of which we featured on two walls of creative at the event.

I did manage to sneak in a few Tweets from our presenters Gary Adamson and Sonia Rhodes. You can find them by going to my Twitter stream, www.twitter.com/giennaor by searching on Twitter for the hashtag #hl09. Be sure to check out the excellent highlights from Carrie Vaughan and Elyas Bakhtiari. They must have really good cell phone plans.

An Open Letter to the Millennial-Wary

The way several presenters at this year’s SHSMD conference spoke about us so-called “millennials,” you’d think Converse-wearing, Red Bull-chugging, iPhone-wielding 20-somethings were making a run on hospital marketing departments everywhere. Words like “needy,” “entitled,” “distracted multi-taskers,” and, worst of all, “notoriously poor critical thinkers” were recklessly thrown around, forcing the few millennials in the room to put down our BlackBerrys, close our MacBooks, take out our earbuds, and hang our heads in shame.

After I packed up my electronics and allowed my embarrassment to subside, I realized the audacity of trying to stereotype such a diverse generation of Americans in a few slides. I mean really, it’s not you’re the Greatest Generation and we’re the hippies, reluctantly joining the workforce with flower-smattered tresses and a lingering herbal aroma.

(If you want a Gen X-er’s take on the best millennial bits from SHSMD, check out Gienna Shaw’s column, The Care and Feeding of the (Sometimes Annoying) Millennials. A speaker at a session Gienna attended said that one characteristics of Gen X is that they are annoyed by the younger generation, so if you’re looking for snarky millennial observations, her column is the place for you.)

Anyway, I want to take this time to tell everyone to, well, chillax. Millennials, Generation Y, or whatever you want to call us aren’t really that hard to communicate with, either as employees or potential patients. Let’s clear up a few misconceptions. [more]

SHSMD 2009: Revisiting a Familiar Campaign

The campaign presented at a Thursday morning session at this year’s SHSMD conference was one that caught our eye before. It was the Hennepin County Medical Center guerilla marketing campaign aimed at promoting traumatic brain injury (TBI) awareness. Ted Blank, director of marketing and referral development at Hennepin, and Brent Doering, vice president of client services at Minneapolis agency Russell Herder, gave the audience a detailed look at the effort in the aptly named session, “Bathtubs, BlackBerries, & Brains: A Case Study in Guerilla Marketing.”

The “Save Your Brain” campaign came about as a result of recent clinical research that indicated more than 1.4 million Americans suffer from TBIs each year—100,000 of whom are from Minnesota, and most of whom are young adults. So, Minneapolis’ Hennepin took on the challenge of targeting that hard-to-reach market.

The marketing team decided the best way to deliver its message was a multiphase campaign that would give the facility a chance to get out into the community and engage local youths at malls and sporting events. Marketers decided to use temporary tattoos, coasters, a rolling community awareness bathtub, and a Brain Bar kiosk to maximize word-of-mouth buzz—and it worked. Within the first 24 hours of the campaign, Hennepin received more than 50 calls to schedule an examination for a potentially undiagnosed brain injury and has generated millions of impressions in broadcast, print, and online media coverage.

“Guerilla marketing can be a tremendously cost effective way to reach a large amount of people,” Blank says. “It gives a large return for a very minmial investment and you really do get some true engagement out of it.”

 Healthcare Marketing Advisor subscribers can read more about the campaign in the January issue.

SHSMD 2009: Tweeting in a Vaccuum

One challenge of Tweeting from a conference using a device such as a phone or mobile device: It’s difficult to keep up with what others are posting. Healthcare marketers at this week’s SHSMD conference in Orlando have been very active, though. So here’s a a sampling of the Tweets so far (some have been edited for clarity).

For starters, SHSMD itself is Tweeting from the event. Find them at www.twitter.com/shsmd2009. Here’s some of what they’ve been posting:

Win $100 by posting the most popular pic to the #SHSMD Facebook Event Page! Or we’ll post for you if you send to SHSMDcommunity (at) aha.org. Deadline to submit is Monday 10/5.

Carol Dobies, CEO, Dobies Healthcare Group writes: 

Listening to [Paul] Begala on health reform from SHSMD–past failures in healthcare good lessons learned. Moderate bill will pass.

Intro to Begala at #shsmd well done! Hilarious intro to an equally hilarious speaker.

ND&P’s Danny Fell posts:

Listening to Paul Begala speaking at SHSMD–very entertaining and great insight on politics and health reform.

Writes Ross Bruno: By the Numbers’ research says 39% of hospitals do not have newcomer programs for community and Hospitals are setting communications budgets at an average of 0.61% of operations revenue. 

PRC’s National Consumer Study is a fascinating look at 25 years of changing consumer perceptions of healthcare.

Tracy Weise writes from this morning’s general session:

Barry Schwartz says too much choice leads to decision paralysis.

Barry Schwartz: why do we advertise prescript drugs when we can not buy them without physician intervention?

And one more, just for fun, from the Weekly Probe: Liquor sales spike in Orlando, officials cite link to healthcare marketing conference. (via Chris Boyer).

You can read my posts from the conference at www.twitter.com/gienna. This is just a small sampling of all the great Tweets from Orlando, but if you are posting from SHSMD and I missed you add your Twitter ID to the comments section so others can find you.

Campaign Spotlight: Patient Stories Go Multimedia

Kurt is a young athlete and student who has survived cancer. Jane is a hula-hoop-loving fourth grader who has juvenile diabetes. Kavan is an active toddler who spent the first weeks of his live in intensive care. Although these youths’ stories are different, they have one thing in common. They each have a dedicated Web page on the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital site that tells their stories in words, videos, and photos.

The Minneapolis hospital created detailed Web pages like these for nine patients as part of its fall advertising campaign, which launched on September 14. The campaign’s initial flight includes newspaper, magazine, billboard, TV, Web, and social media elements.

Read more about the multimedia children’s campaign here.

Guest Post: Probing Viral Marketing Tactics

Exclusive:

Disposable toilet seat covers offer new form of social media marketing for hospitals

Hospital marketers now have a new form of social media to explore to get their message out—disposable toilet seat covers. At least, that’s the pitch from Tom Teynor, president of Slip-U-Not, the leading manufacturer of disposable toilet seat covers in North America.

“The options for custom designing your TSCs are really endless, and it’s a perfect medium for hospitals given their large toilet volumes,” says Teynor. “We consider this a form of social media given the open format and networking aspect of the medium.”

Teynor, whose company offers a special adhesive solution to prevent slippage, notes that the TSC industry is over $3 billion in annual sales, with the majority coming from healthcare. While no hospital is currently using the customized TSC for branding purposes, GI Centers have been fast adopters, according to Teynor.

I’m sorry, what?

OK, so if you haven’t caught on by now, this isn’t a real story about healthcare marketing. But it’s the kind of story you’ll find at The Weekly Probe, a Web site our firm created in April. [more]

In the Future, it’s all about the Patient’s Experience

In this month’s HealthLeaders magazine cover story, I wrote about The Patient of the Future.

From adopting (and adapting to) new technologies to building better doctor-patient relationships to making it easier for patients to get information about their health to making it easier for them to book appointments, the predictions in the article all have one thing in common: They improve the patient experience.

My favorite prediction: Docs will start using e-mail to communicate with patients (I sure wish mine would). And two of the most outrageous predictions: people will start taking ownership of their own health and physicians will get over the whole “I’m the doctor and I know best” attitude.

What do you think the future holds for patients and patient care? Do you think any of the predictions in the article are totally off the mark? I’d love (as always) to hear your thoughts.