Can You Leverage the Anxious Language of a Pandemic to Build a Stronger Hospital Brand? Here’s What Nemours Children’s Health System Did
// By Peter Hochstein //
You might think that co-opting language associated with COVID-19 could scare people away. Instead, it called attention to advertising that helped to reassure worried parents.
Let’s clearly state a few factual negatives first.
Tilt, the advertising agency behind the campaign you’re about to read about, is not the same Tilt art studio in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that invented a spokes-puppet for a chain of urgent care clinics we wrote about here more than a year ago. The Tilt in this story is an advertising agency with offices in Detroit, London, and Calcutta.
And furthermore, Sarah Sanders, vice president and chief marketing officer of Nemours Children’s Health System, is not the Sarah Sanders recently of White House prominence. Strike that thought from your mind.
And still furthermore, this story is about an advertising campaign for Nemours Children’s Health System that harnesses buzzwords like “contagious” and “going around” and “infection” and “contact” and “droplets.” But it is not about how to take precautions to avoid COVID-19. At least not in any direct way. Nor are some of the campaign’s video images, like dandelion seeds blowing in the wind, or bubbles spreading through the air and popping, meant to directly alert you to precautions you should take before heading out the door.
Got all that? Then on to the story.