How to Cure Bad Hospital Ads

The magazine advertisement is an unreadable, washed-out mess.

A cop in the ad leans a little awkwardly against his squad car. Hand on gun, sporting the requisite cop mustache and scowl, he squints through his glasses into the distance. Just above his crotch is a headline in quotes: “Back in Force.” The pun isn’t clever; worse, it isn’t even interesting. The type is uninviting and highly compressed. Small and hard to read, it’s also obscured by being superimposed over the cop’s blue-clad legs and the lower part of the patrol car. 

Not that many people will read it, but the story, well-told, could have been quite interesting: The policeman, it seems, suffered liver failure, and Baylor cured him with a transplant. Sadly, the ad’s body copy is as unsuccessful as its design. The folksy tone may make sense when the cop is quoted directly, but a sentence like “Carl Dunlap, former athlete and Gainesville’s chief of police, was not one to get sick,” just doesn’t sound like the voice of a leading medical facility. And Dunlap’s benediction—“I tell everyone, if you need a transplant, you need to go to Baylor”—is a little creepy.

Next comes a logo for Baylor Regional Transplant Institute and below that, in small type, the words Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas and Baylor All Saints Medical Center at Fort Worth, plus an 800-number and a Web address. Finally there’s the street addresses, followed by enough microscopic legal disclaimers to do a pharmaceutical ad proud.

Amid the profusion of wretchedness in this effort from Baylor agency Revel United of Dallas, the most singular aspect is this: It ran in the prestigious New Yorker magazine. But more about that in a minute. 

These days, we can hardly look anywhere without seeing a hospital ad. This proliferation seems a little counterintuitive because, as we hear every day, there is a crisis in the cost of medical care and, more and more, insurance companies are dictating how and where we can receive it. Even so, hospitals have embraced advertising for three big reasons: 

›› Competition for patients who, either through insurance or with their own money, can afford to pay for their care;
›› Competition from the growing number of doctor-run specialty clinics;
›› The fact that rising costs, plus an exploding availability of information, have made people who are able to choose far more, well, choosy.

“Consumers used to go wherever their doctors suggested, but now they’re able to seek out the optimum in terms of cost, convenience and proven success rates,” says Paul Spiegelman, founder and CEO of Bedford-based The Beryl Cos., which fields telephone inquiries for Baylor, HCA, Medical City, and some 450 additional hospitals nationwide. “More than 50 percent of the time, consumers are willing to overrule physicians’ choices.”

In part they can do this by going online to such sites as www.leapfroggroup.org, www.healthgrades.com, and www.cms.gov, which provide bountiful comparative information on hospitals and physicians as to pricing, amenities, and even mortality rates for various procedures.

“Since most doctors are affiliated with multiple hospitals, the patients often keep their physician but choose the hospital,” Spiegelman says. “Consumers are now more in control of their care.”

As for hospitals looking for consumers who can pay, Jim McGhee, a principal at Dallas’ Richards Group—which handles advertising for Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center of Houston, and UCLA Health System of California—puts it this way: “Hospitals are advertising, in part, to improve the payer mix. Some not-for-profit hospitals end up with a number of charity [cases] or, in the case of Medicare, low-paying patients. In order to serve the community and also stay in business, they must attract people with good insurance or the ability to self-pay.”

Alan Lidji, of Dallas’ Lidji Design Office, who created advertising for Presbyterian Hospital in the 1990s and has since worked on dozens of medical accounts and publications, says that most doctor-run specialty clinics “skim the top of the consumer base, and hospitals see them as a real threat. Many of these clinics advertise, and hospitals feel that they must respond. The problem is, most of them do it so poorly.”

Lidji says the medical profession—especially in the case of smaller, doctor-owned surgical hospitals—is often “a toxic environment for good advertising. Because of their power, some doctors get involved. They become art directors, writers, and editors. They come in mid-stream, screw up the work, then run out to do an appendectomy, leaving the pros behind to sort out the damage.”

This sentiment is echoed by Doug Rucker of Rucker & Co., a Dallas copywriter who created the memorable “Specialists In Life” campaign for Medical City. “Most hospitals have too many people involved in the advertising process. There is usually a marketing department that has to please a committee of doctors, each fighting for his department,” he says. “Physicians are smart when it comes to the human body, but don’t know much about advertising. We were lucky to be able to work at the CEO level and not have to fight a lot of Balkanized thinking.” The result: vibrant TV spots and billboards for Medical City with headlines like “Grab life by the ventricles” and “Your health is always on our cerebral cortex,” which drove sales and helped start, in 2002, the local trend toward heavy hospital advertising.

LEADING FROM STRENGTH

So, who is doing effective hospital advertising in North Texas? UT Southwestern Medical Center, for one. Through its agency, Lewis Communications of Birmingham, Ala., this teaching hospital has differentiated itself from the pack through simple but powerful television and print work that makes the brand memorable. How? By being true to the product.

“I am a physician, a teacher, a researcher,” says a Southwestern doctor in one TV spot. She continues: “I am a cross trainer.” In each commercial, she and her colleagues illustrate the strongly emotional voiceover copy (“I am a racer. I’m racing your mother’s tumor.”) merely by doing what they do in the course of a typical day. Superb film direction and editing provide the drama. As with Medical City’s “Specialists In Life” campaign, the varied and complex operations of a hospital are presented in a unified manner that commands interest and invites empathy.

Like Southwestern, Children’s leads from strength. Everything it does in broadcast and print from Richards Partners powers home its branding message: “The One For Children.” On TV, Children’s goes for our hearts by showing kids and talking about a youngster who’s had a serious medical problem. And all you can think is, please, God, don’t let mine be the one. This work, because it’s so simple and beautifully produced, focuses our emotions on the premise and our minds on the brand. 

Which is the real point of all brand building. Sure, a certain, relatively small percentage of people need your product right now, but does anybody pay attention to the details of a tire ad when they aren’t looking for tires? At some point, when you need a hospital, the hospitals that have reached you most memorably and affectingly will get a shot at your business. So we’ll remember that UT Southwestern is a hospital filled with doctors whose work is informed by their experience as teachers and researchers, that Medical City is staffed by Specialists In Life, and that Children’s is The One For Children. What, then, is Baylor?

For one thing, Baylor is by far the biggest player in local hospital advertising. According to TNS Media Intelligence, between Sept. 25, 2006, and Sept. 30, 2007, Dallas-Fort Worth hospitals spent $15.2 million on media advertising (not including direct mail, public relations, trade advertising, and other marketing expenditures). Of this, Baylor spent $5.4 million, or a little more that 35 percent. What did it spend it on? Besides the cop ad, on a ton of TV, radio, print, and outdoor messages. Can you remember any of them?

While the cop ad is awful enough to be unforgettable, its placement in The New Yorker compounds the error by several orders. Yes, those pages offer an upscale, prestigious, well-educated market, but this expensive magazine sells no Dallas or Texas editions, and the total Texas circulation is only 29,470. Baylor could practically send doctors out prospecting door to door more efficiently. And if it were actually aiming at some unseen audience (people who vote on hospital rankings, say), it should have picked creative that wasn’t an embarrassment, because an ad in The New Yorker competes with the smartest work in print. I have no idea how this happened and can only guess at what Baylor paid—in part because its media buyer hung up on me when I asked. 

All advertising agencies are good at making excuses; good agencies are good at making ads. The people who created the cop ad will, I’m sure, offer various justifications. But though both agency and client have told me otherwise, I’m sticking with Alan Lidji’s hard-won experience, and assuming that doctors got involved.

In more than 35 years as an advertising copywriter and creative director, Spencer Michlin has created outdoor advertising for such clients as Pepsi, Coke, Frito-Lay, and Ford Trucks.  His work has won virtually every advertising award, and he served for four years as adjunct professor of copywriting at SMU’s Temerlin School of Advertising.