Penn State Health raises profile by partnering with Pavone 

If you do your job well each day and for a long time, that doesn’t mean that everyone who could benefit from your expertise and experience is aware of your efforts. Penn State Health realized that dynamic exits, so it set out to raise awareness about its treatments for cancer.

“We are really the only true academic medical health system in central Pennsylvania,” said Stacy Beers, vice president of marketing at Penn State Health, which operates the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and other facilities in the region. “We have been here all along, and this level of care has always been here.”

Penn State Health partnered with Pavone, a part of the Pavone Group marketing company, to reinforce the health system’s presence in the mid-state, while highlighting its cancer-fighting resources. Through a mix of television, digital, social media, and other communications, the marketing campaign includes a series of short videos that use central Pennsylvania communities as a backdrop, while in some materials highlighting the actual doctors who provide care. The campaign started in February with some local Super Bowl ads and has been running since.

The effort has been an attempt to move beyond a typical branding campaign, said Beers and Chuck Meehan, chief creative officer at Pavone. For one thing, cancer treatments are not services that the target audience would necessarily need now. Usual metrics such as new patient admissions would not be a good barometer of whether the effort succeeded, Beers explained. Instead, the goal was to gauge how well people received and engaged with the messages.

While she did not provide details of what metrics were used, Beers said audience engagement was high.

“Consumers are changing. They want more information. They are not going to believe in the canned advertising approach to marketing,” Beers said. “They want authentic and real stories. And they have way more information at their fingertips than we ever did. That is the direction we need to be thinking about marketing and advertising for these programs.”

Seeking authenticity

One of the videos depicts real doctors sitting around a table and discussing the details of a patient’s cancer treatments.

“It wasn’t scripted at all. Stacy got all the doctors in a room, and we just rolled the camera and let them talk,” Meehan said. “That was why it was so real.”

When he saw the doctors in that setting, it reminded him of the Hall of Justice in the DC Comics universe.

“That is where I came up with the ‘League of Cancer Fighters,’” Meehan added, referencing a tagline in the video. “It was one of those beautiful happy accidents. The fact that it became one of  the most successful videos is interesting.”

Consumers responded well to the “table” video because it provided them with an inner look at the cancer-fighting process, Beers said.

“They have an interest in the authenticity,” she said. “And that is the direction that advertising is going.”

Increasing awareness

The health system also wants people to be aware of its other facilities in the region, such as its advanced cancer care center at Hampden Medical Center on the West Shore that opened late last year, as well as its facilities in Lancaster County and Reading in Berks County.

When it comes to fighting cancer, a simple Google search will show that there are several highly rated health systems in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as well as the acclaimed John Hopkins to the south in Baltimore, Maryland.

Knowing the local market as she does, Beers pointed out, central Pennsylvanians often have a hard time crossing the Susquehanna River for services of any sort.

Cancer treatments can take six solid weeks, so people should know that they can stay in this region and not have to make long trips on the PA Turnpike or down Interstate 83, Beers said.

“It isn’t that we are seeing in our data that people are leaving the area,” she said. “It is that we know that this market doesn’t want to leave the area.”

The campaign also counters any misperceptions that people can only find high-level care in bigger metropolitan areas, Beers and Meehan said.

“It is more of an awareness and perception issue than it is a level-of-care issue,” Beers said. “We need to tell people what we offer right here in central Pennsylvania.”

“And we are not trying to tell people what to do,” she continued. “We are trying to show them the options.”

The success of the cancer-fighting campaign led Penn State Health to use the template for marketing initiatives produced by Pavone that will promote the system’s heart and vascular expertise. Later this summer, it plans to roll out additional material to support its pediatrics and women’s health services, Beers said.

In a prepared statement, Kyle Snyder, chief operating officer at Penn State Health, said the cancer-fighting campaign is about reassurance, not promotion.

“Patients deserve to know that leading-edge cancer care and experienced specialists are already here, rooted in their community,” he said. “This work reflects the level of care we deliver every day and the responsibility we take seriously as clinicians.”

Thomas A. Barstow is a freelance writer