In defense of hospital advertising
Why The New York Times has it all wrong
Recently The New York Times published an article titled “Ask Your Doctor if This Ad Is Right for You,” which discusses the ethical boundaries (or lack thereof) of hospital/pharmaceutical advertising. I am all for criticism, but this article ridicules ads that spread highly emotional messages and sometimes blur the facts. As a healthcare marketing specialist, I feel obliged to defend my work, my craft, and my passion.
The report lumps pharmaceutical and hospital advertising together as if one and the same, though, the majority of the article discusses drug companies and their promotion of products. The few paragraphs that do mention hospital advertising are critical of its often emotional tone and subsequent misleading messages. Between the negativity, however, the article fails to report the value of healthcare organizations marketing their services.
Let me fill you in
In a competitive marketplace, smaller less expensive community hospitals pinned against larger more expensive academic medical centers struggle with issues such as leakage and outmigration. However, they often have better outcomes and can provide more personalized care than their competitors. The problem is that they can’t get people to believe it. People in their community will drive out of their way — up to two hours — to go to the big teaching hospitals that tout their level of clinical expertise. In order to fairly compete, community hospitals need to advertise what their competitors cannot: patient-centered care. And emotional ads can help paint a picture of this type of service.
How? Through the art of storytelling. Patient stories, rather than patient testimonials, can be inherently emotional. Over the years, we’ve heard remarkable patient stories ranging from life-saving emergency heart surgeries to life-changing bariatrics programs. How a mom whose relief from back pain enabled her to play with her kids again or how a hardware associate’s quintuple bypass made him feel 20 years younger. These aren’t made-up narratives to help hospitals’ sell their services. These stories can be as real as the people who tell them.
Maybe not all advertising agencies feel as strongly as we do, but one of our goals is to provide patients with superior clinical care and customer service right in their hometowns. How do we help move the needle? We advertise hospitals that believe in patient-centered care. We help David beat Goliath.
Telling emotional stories can help these players rightly position themselves against bigger organizations. And because of this, they can provide quality and compassionate healthcare to people of their communities. In defense of healthcare advertising, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.