Hospital Leapfrogs Competitor’s Robotic Surgery Technology, Advertising Campaigns Leverage the Differentiation and Drive Dramatic Growth

Advertising Worth Noting

By Peter Hochstein

This tale begins in 2008, when the people running things at Covenant HealthCare, today a 643-bed multiple facility institution with campuses in and around Saginaw, Michigan, began hearing rumors about robots.

Well, not just any robots. These were da Vinci Surgical System robots, those high-tech devices increasingly used in minimally invasive surgery. A new high-definition da Vinci system was about to be released, and word was getting around that one of Covenant’s two regional rivals, St. Mary’s of Michigan Medical Center, was not going to upgrade. St. Mary’s, at the time, was the only hospital in the region that offered robotic surgery.

Before this story goes any further, you’ll probably want to know how Covenant become aware of rival St. Mary’s internal purchasing decisions.

That was easy. Larry Daly, Director of Planning and Business Development at Covenant HealthCare, says da Vinci salesmen, who paid sales calls to both hospitals, tended to be rather chatty. And some physicians doing robotic surgery at St. Mary’s also had privileges at Covenant. They also were part of the chatter. And so the word got out.

“It was like a window of opportunity for us,” Daly says of the market intelligence. The opportunity was to “own the robotic surgery market in the region . . . Our strategy was to purchase the latest model and attract the surgeons to our program—and to have them help build surgical interest in robotics.”Daly says an initial advertising campaign, created by Covenant’s advertising agency, Brogan and Partners of Birmingham, Michigan, “differentiated our program to consumers, extolling the virtues of high definition and precision [provided by] the new robot,” which was more technically advanced than the one at St. Mary’s. It also helped build confidence among doctors that Covenant HealthCare was seriously committed to building a robotic center.

That worked, adds Daly, who wants the credit for his hospital’s robotics program to be shared by “a great group of surgeons, trained and dedicated surgical staff, and supportive marketing,” all of which helped Covenant to become “the leading robotic center in our region.”

But the advertising breakthrough really began after the growing robotic surgical center acquired a second robot. That’s when Covenant and Brogan decided to launch a more consumer-focused campaign that would point out what patients can gain from robotic surgery.

In most advertising for robotic surgery, Daly says, “Typically what you see is surgeons with folded arms looking at you with confidence. Or you see the machine just standing there. Or you see the surgeon with his head buried” in a rigid viewing hood.

To avoid this and answer the question for consumers, “What’s in it for me?” Brogan came up with images that illustrate benefits like, “Get back to shopping sooner,” or “Get back to exercising sooner,” and even a golf-oriented promise, “Get back to the greens sooner.” But it was graphic imagery that gave those promises their high voltage.

Highway billboards deliver the main message and a URL. The visual surprise of a robot playing golf “makes robotics less scary,” says Mastropaolo, who estimates the billboards generated more than 3.7 million impressions between December 2013 and March 2014.

Each advertisement anthropomorphizes a multi-armed da Vinci robot and shows it actually participating in the activity—by carrying shopping bags, or walking a live dog along a beach, or putting on a golf green.

“From our standpoint, it’s all about making an emotional connection,” says Julia Mastropaolo, Partner and Health Care Director at Brogan. “In this case, it’s by touching the funny bone. In humanizing the robots, [the advertising] makes people smile. It makes robotic surgery less scary. It’s kind of Healthcare Marketing 101—approaching the high-tech product in a unique and human way to get the message across.”

The anthropomorphic robot campaign launched at the end of 2013 and ran through March 2014. It consisted of highway billboard advertising, four-color ads in local newspapers that netted more than 211,000 impressions, and interactive Web ads.

The media budget didn’t allow for television, says Daly, a bit sadly. (He volunteers that he harbored fantasies of a TV spot in which a da Vinci robot wheels up to a school bus and hands a child his lunchbox.) In fact, the entire da Vinci advertising budget was what Daly calls “a secondary campaign” that spent only a small percentage of Covenant HealthCare’s total marketing budget of roughly $500,000.

All the robotics advertising directed readers to an information-rich website offering, among many things, educational videos about robotic surgery, a list of surgical services that could be done with a da Vinci robot, and a physician finder. You can find the website at strategicHCmarketing.com/go/robot/.

How well is it all working? Daly insists that an impressive increase in traffic that coincided with the advertising campaign can’t be directly attributed to advertising alone, since other efforts such as building the robotics medical staff are also at play. But in GYN cases alone, the hospital increased its robotics gynecological procedures approximately 80 percent, he says. Meanwhile, Covenant, which already owns two da Vinci robots, is considering buying a third.

The advertising approach and its results also impressed Intuitive Surgical, Inc., the makers of the da Vinci system. Daly says that people from that company “have recently spent a great deal of time with me and John Germain, the Administrative Director of Surgery at Covenant, to create a case study that Intuitive will share around the world to show how a hospital in a ‘smallish market’ could illustrate the benefits of robotic surgery and grow into one of their most robust robotic surgery centers.”

Peter Hochstein is a direct-response advertising consultant, business journalist, and author. He is the author of Lessons from 9 Innovative Health Care Marketing Campaigns. You can reach him through his website.