AdventHealth is a non-profit health care system that operates 52 hospitals in nine states and serves over 6.7 million patients annually. Their brand team created a series of ads, like this one, as part of their “Human Spirit” campaign.
It’s a beautiful brand ad…
I’ll be honest. Brand campaigns confuse me.
20 years ago, before Google and Facebook, before Netflix and Prime Video, a branded TV ad made more sense. Today, when mico-targeting is essential to reaching your target audience, I struggle with these types of campaigns, because it’s just so hard and expensive to hit your targeted audience with an impactful brand ad.
If the intent is increased sales, which virtually all of the campaigns I’ve really worked on are, my assumption is that people don’t choose which health system they used based on brand perception.
At least for me, I’ll go to the most convenient place I can that is in-network with my health insurance plan. My assumption is that systems like Advent that focus on this type of branding are in crowded markets, where the distance between two systems is nominal and both systems accept most insurance plans, then brand perception has a bigger impact.
Most digital health companies are point solutions addressing specific problems, and your best traffic will come from people looking for your service through search.
All that said, I did love this ad and wanted to talk about it here and get feedback from others in the collective.
My thoughts on AdventHealth’s Human Spirit Campaign
What I see so often in healthcare, and this ad exemplifies it, are companies trying to recreate Kaiser’s Thrive campaign from the early 2000’s. “Thrive” was a game changer in healthcare marketing – at least from my perspective at the time – because it wasn’t selling on product features and benefits, it was aspirational.
The not so subtle message was, you should get your care from Kaiser because we want you to Thrive.
AdventHealth’s Human Spirit Campaign, and specifically this ad, is beautifully executed and falls within that spirit of “Thrive” for me. It’s emotional – you kinda want to do a happy cry when you watch it – and the quality of it is exceptional.
Having done a lot of ads like this, I know how hard it is to make these staged instances feel authentic and I know how much work goes into setting up shoots in multiple locations just to pull 3 to 5 seconds of video.
It’s very well done. My question would be, did it make any sort of impact and how would you know?
I’ve done a little bit of this kind of work, mostly in the ecommerce space, and the way we measured the impact of branded ads (outside of phone calls, direct click through rates on the ad, and conversions off the ad) would be these areas:
- Branded search volume: Did searches for “Advent Health” go up after the campaign was launched;
- Utilization of service lines: Did utilization of the AdventHealth health care system go up in areas where they ran the ads? Did use of a speciality service line, like oncology or cardiology increase?
- Hiring and retention: I’ve run brand campaigns aimed specifically at our own employees to try to give them pride in where they work and reduce attrition. Ads like these are often created, at least in part, to run at corporate events or on corporate social media in order to rally staff.
- Social media engagement: It seems to happen less and less these days, but there are those moments when branded ads go viral on social media. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, based on why it goes viral and whether or not you believe the old adage that no press is bad press.
There are certainly other things you could measure on a campaign like this. These are my thoughts, and I’m anxious to hear from the guys at Author’s who build these kinds of ads all the time. How have they seen companies like Meta use these kinds of ads, and do they know what the impact is.
I’m also anxious to hear from the team at Matchnode who operates on the other end of the spectrum in direct response online marketing. Do they ever use branded ads, and if so, how do they use them and do they work?
From Brandon I’d love to know how these types of ads impact sales teams, if at all? How do sales folks feel about these types of ads and where and when do they matter?
My Best Experience with a Branded Ad Campaign
Again, full disclosure, I have not led marketing at massive companies with gratuitous ad budgets. $10-$15M per year has been roughly where I’ve maxed out and the dollars I’ve spent have almost always been tied directly to a lead, sales and customer acquisition cost (CAC) target.
The one time I really played with branding, at scale, was at eHealth with our “we make Obamacare easy” campaign. But, that campaign was designed to function like a direct response campaign; it was aimed directly at customers we’d lost to government exchanges, and it directly addressed the reasons why they left us in the first place, and what they hated about the exchanges.
In other words, I knew exactly who to target, and how, and I knew exactly what they wanted and what they didn’t like about my competitors. That level of insight makes it easy to build a branded ad that you can invest in, measure, and optimize.
We did expand it beyond lost customers by retargeting off of our educational content about Obamacare (we assumed people searching for things like “how does Obamacare work?” were likely in-market for Obamacare) and retargeting them with our brand ads. That approach worked as well – to an extent – on both a CTR/CAC basis and on a lift in branded search volume.
Like most display ads, there was a point at which the increase in spend did not correlate to an increase in sales and we had to pull back.
Measuring the Impact of Branded Ads
Those are my thoughts. Would love to see / read comments or insights from others on branded campaigns you’ve down and how you measured their impact. Of the number metrics that could be used to gauge brand impact, i’d love to hear thoughts on the following:
- Brand awareness: I’ve fielded brand strength monitors for public companies before. Without hundreds of millions to spend, unaided awareness rarely moved more than a percent or two. If you’ve seen campaigns lead to big increases in unaided brand awareness, please share.
- Social media engagement: Have you created videos that generated significant social media buzz and engagement?
- Website traffic: I love to hear about branded campaigns that drive large increases in visitors to a website – good or bad.
Campaigns That Resonates
The AdventHealth Human Spirit Ads are a great example of how marketing can move beyond product promotion and connect with people on a deeper level. When and how do they move the needle on sales? Looking forward to hearing from our experts.
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