Advertising for Health and Hospitals

At GWP, we love working with hospitals and healthcare groups because the “product,” at its core, is help and comfort for people when they need it most. We were thrilled to win the Telly Awards’ prestigious Brand category, for a series of TV commercials that GWP Health recently produced for a large Hospital Group. (You can see them here.) This week, we’ve been filming interviews for a series of videos. There is passion and a palpable sense of mission in all of the footage. A cardiologist glows when she describes the progress of a patient; a foundation donor gets a catch in his throat while talking about the pediatric ICU; a nurse-turned-Hospital President beams proudly as she announces awards for her staff. We walk out of the hospital at the end of the day full of inspiring stories, and honored to be part of sharing them. With the live interviews still echoing in our heads, we start to talk about editing on the drive home. We review our favorite moments and quotes and plan how to capture the emotion of the day so that our audiences will feel it, too. That emotion is important because it makes viewers pay attention. Brand Advertising builds associations and responses that are evoked by a company’s name, and it requires a combination of factual and emotional appeal, repeated in compelling and memorable ways. And again: with our hospital group client, we want our audience to hear our message because we genuinely believe in the “product.” “Branding” in this case associates hospitals and healthcare with positive emotions, and also promotes healthy lifestyles and wise preventive medicine. It’s a double bottom line: grow a healthcare group’s profile, and also grow the overall health of the community. So… we were very proud to win the Telly Brand Campaign award. But, to tell the truth, we are proud every time a doctor or donor, a patient or president, shares their story and trusts us to help shape it and tell it to the people who need to hear it. It was a good week at GWP, Inc.