Laughter Can Be the Best Medicine for a Hospital Brand—Especially If You Know How to Reap More Yucks for the Bucks: Here’s How
Notable Health Care Advertising
// By Peter Hochstein //
Uh oh! Something isn’t quite right about the race car driver in a TV spot.
He’s a bit too pudgy. He seems overly fidgety. Instead of wearing a race car driver’s fireproof suit, he’s sporting a short-sleeved polo shirt. And as he floors the gas pedal and roars down the track, he keeps looking around and flinching.
Suddenly he jolts awake—in a movie theater, where the roar of his engine actually turns out to have been the sound of his own snoring intruding into his dream. His furious wife is sharply elbowing him in the ribs.
Cut away to the chief medical officer of South Nassau Communities Hospital, sitting in the same theater.
“Can snoring be a serious health issue?” he asks, as he launches into a four-sentence talk about sleep apnea, which refers viewers to TruthInMedicine.org, a special website for South Nassau Communities Hospital of Oceanside, New York.
Then back to our snoring dreamer, whose enraged wife finally whacks him so hard that the popcorn in his bucket goes flying. Come right back after you spend 30 seconds here to see how funny a 30-second TV spot can be:
The spot, which began running on cable TV and Facebook in early September, is part of a new flight of advertising for the South Nassau Communities Hospital (call it SNCH for short) that launched Labor Day 2017. In part, it’s the product of meticulous data analysis and advertising planning detailed last summer by our sibling publication eHealthcare Strategy & Trends.
Joe Calderone, senior vice president of corporate communications and development at SNCH
After an earlier flight of other funny spots, which ran at various times from September 2016 until March 2017, data analytics showed awareness up by 25.4 percent, with recall, image, preference for SNCH, and brand loyalty all increasing significantly. Moreover, all this is happening in “a very crowded, competitive marketplace,” says Joe Calderone, senior vice president of corporate communications and development at SNCH.