The healthcare landscape is getting more competitive. Advertising is too

Thank you to everyone who attended LinkedIn’s Let’s Talk Diabetes live show yesterday, which was the second episode in our Let’s Talk Health and Wellness series. If you missed the event, you can watch a replay below.

Now here’s what we’re talking about this week.

On my drive to work each morning, it’s common to see large billboards for healthcare providers along the freeway, where local health systems in the Bay Area advertise service lines like orthopedics and cancer care.

The pandemic has had a significant impact on many areas of the healthcare industry, and advertising is no exception. Those service line ads are just one piece of a multifaceted message that health systems have been rolling out in the post-covid era, with campaigns evolving to meet an ever-more-competitive landscape.?

It’s more than just covid too.

Academic medical centers are increasingly moving in on the turf that community hospitals once dominated as they buy up local hospitals and tout care closer to home. New entrants like CVS, Walgreens and Amazon are making big plays in primary care. And everyone is competing for clinical staff.

I recently sat down with Ellis Verdi , president of advertising agency DeVito/Verdi for his take on what’s happening in healthcare advertising these days. Here’s what he had to say.

And tell me: What are some of your favorite healthcare ads?

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

LinkedIn News: What trends have you been seeing in the past couple of years?

Verdi: You now have a retail community with deep pockets entering healthcare, and they are operating for success just the way the hospitals are. We’re seeing a fight down-funnel on who captures the customer. If a hospital has to give up a patient to a Walmart urgent care facility, for example, they may not get that [patient later on]. That kind of activity is pretty new to the industry.?

There are also innovations in the industry. One that we are all very familiar with is telehealth. All of a sudden, during covid, it became one of the largest business growth environments that there is. That’s brand new, and that’s affecting marketing, because that affects the path to purchase.?

One thing covid did was that it strained human capital to the point where non-human capital became more important. In other words, the ability to check somebody in quickly or the ability to care for them at home – those kinds of efficiencies became so much more critical and important.?

Covid nurses have been strained to the max, both physically and psychologically. So health systems are in hiring mode. All the systems are trying to get the best people that they can to fulfill their needs. That impacts every marketing decision.?

LinkedIn News: Give me an example of that messaging.

Verdi: One of our clients about a year or so ago decided to do a campaign called Badges of Honor to promote the importance, the integrity and the value of the people that work there. Because if they feel great about what they do … that’s going to help the organization immensely. Two or three years ago, I don’t think that [message] would have come up so high. But it became an incredible success and it continues to be an incredible success.?

LinkedIn News: What are some of the mistakes hospitals are making in their advertising?

Verdi: There’s a reliance on certain visual material —? a doctor in a white coat, a nurse putting her arm around the patient, someone holding someone else’s hand lovingly – and when you use it, you automatically become generic. Or sometimes they use nice visuals of the building with the flower bed in front of it, [but] what goes on inside is so much more important.?

There’s also a tendency to rely on process as opposed to product, which is not necessarily the best thing from a marketing and advertising standpoint. They forget their public service. There’s an emotional context here that they lose in a lot of their work. [When your message is], “Go for a breast cancer checkup; you’ll get it done quickly,” where’s the emotion?

The best marketing and advertising in my view has the institution above the individual egos of the various people in it. There are still many, many hospitals out there where you see the doctors being put front and center, especially the famous ones. You might say to yourself, Well, why not? I think that what’s more important would be to focus on what that person does for the consumer, and you could relegate his name to the body copy. At best.

LinkedIn News: When you think about stakeholders – patients, job candidates – are they looking for a different message than they were pre-covid?

Verdi: I think that we are pretty fed up with an environment which has consistently shown us that there’s more friction in the system than is necessary. In other words, you can go to the emergency room and still wait for hours; you can go to see your doctor, but the appointment has to be set for three weeks from now. You could have a problem that requires different specialties, and you’re the one running around town with your [imaging] photos [trying to coordinate care.]

The biggest issue with our healthcare system is that we haven’t found a frictionless environment that is conducive to helping patients. And at the end of the day, what happens is patients not only suffer, but the system suffers as a result of this lack of efficiency and lack of consumer-directed behavior.?

Ultimately, the world is changing. The relationship between doctors and patients has changed. The consumer is getting far more intelligent, far more knowledgeable, and is using Google very effectively, and we need to be cognizant of that, and therefore messaging and marketing must change as a result.