The Power of Hard-to-Ignore Photography Drives Just About Everything in a Successful Traffic-Building Campaign for One Chicago Hospital
Notable Health Care Advertising
// By Peter Hochstein //
What’s the most important part of a print ad? The headline? The story it tells? The news it contains? The offer it makes, if it makes one? A unique selling proposition?
A few years back, the Little Company of Mary Hospital, a 298-bed institution on the southwest side of Chicago, worked with its Elgin, Illinois advertising agency, Demi & Cooper. The purpose was to create an advertising campaign announcing the opening of a new patient tower at the hospital complex. They decided to feature what Little Company of Mary Hospital, or LCMH, as hospital employees call the institution, is known for best—women’s services. And specifically, its maternity services.
“For a very long time we had been known as the baby hospital,” says Kelly Cusack, LCMH Director of public relations and marketing. In a hospital market she describes as “saturated,” with five hospitals within a five-mile radius, one of the primary strengths of LCMH was its maternity care.
Kelly Cusack, Director of public relations and marketing, Little Company of Mary Hospital
Building on that, “this new women’s center gave us the opportunity to have one comprehensive place for women to go to for their health care, at all ages and stages. We wanted women to know that they had one location for them, for their convenience, to be able to receive their health care,” Cusack says. But at the same time, “a big part of that was the family birthing center.”