The new face(s) of Iowa Health
Central Iowa Health has a new look for an old message
Central Iowa Health System, one of the state’s largest health-care providers, has embarked on an aggressive and ambitious advertising campaign to honor its employees, woo more patients and improve the name recognition of its hospitals.
Using the slogan “The Difference Is Inside Us,” the campaign began running last month on television and radio and in local newspapers and magazines. It took 18 months to develop and is expected to last several years, executives said. The goal is to reach more than 90 percent of Central Iowa residents.
It breaks from traditional ad campaigns in the health-care field by featuring personal and emotional testimonials from CIHS employees on why they chose to work in health care. CIHS executives said they hope the new ads will deepen patients’ understanding of the quality and dedication of the company’s workforce. “Most people would agree that these are the types of people that they would want to receive care from,” said Sid Ramsey, CIHS’s vice president of business development.
There are additional goals for the campaign. For example, CIHS surveys have showed that Central Iowans weren’t always aware that CIHS ran both Iowa Methodist Medical Center and Iowa Lutheran Hospital. CIHS also operates Blank Children’s Hospital. As a result, the new ads use a new logo that refers to the umbrella organization as Iowa Health.
“Folks weren’t exactly seeing the connection,” Ramsey said. “There is a growing recognition of Iowa Health. It was seen as a good name and one that people responded to strongly.”
The campaign’s cost, which is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, is expected to consume the majority of Iowa Health’s advertising budget over the next several years, Ramsey said. CIHS worked with Milwaukee-based advertising agency BVK on the ads.
The latest campaign is part of an evolution that began in the 1980s when CMF&Z, the once-dominant agency in Central Iowa that shut its doors last year, developed a series of ads for CIHS that emphasized the personal interactions between patients and health-care workers.
Hospital executives said it was that element of the health-care industry that they wanted to focus on for the new campaign. Inspiration for the current round of ads came from Mount Carmel Health System in Columbus, Ohio.
“Our product is the thousands of personal interactions that happen every day,” said Joe Smith, CIHS’s director of communications.
The ads represent the biggest branding effort for Iowa Health since 1997, when it ran a major campaign promoting Blank Children’s Hospital. The company had another campaign that year titled “The Best at Making You Better.” In more recent years, CIHS has had smaller campaigns for its Heart Reach mobile van and for women’s services, Smith said.
The ads are designed to be emotional. Employees who participate in the campaign work with the ad agency to write their own testimonials and, in the television and radio commercials, at least, they voice their own words. The television and radio ads feature the sound of a single guitar in the background.
Another goal of the campaign is to help boost patient access to Iowa Health and to health-related information. Some of the print ads include a telephone number to a call center staffed with registered nurses or an Internet address to Iowa Health’s Web site.
“It’s very simple and very focused on the kind of care that patients can expect here,” Smith said.
Campaign details: Central Iowa Health System’s new advertising campaign has already begun on local television and radio stations and in several Central Iowa newspapers, including the Des Moines Register and the Des Moines Business Record.
The campaign features testimonials from 23 employees and physicians affiliated with CIHS hospitals, including surgeons, family practitioners, nurses and others who will be featured in television and radio ads. The hospital group expects 26 employees to take part in the print campaign.
The television commercials are 30 seconds long and are designed to evoke strong emotion by using a montage format, which melds shifting portraits of employees. The participating workers describe in their own voices what they do and why they work in health care. The radio ads are similar.
In the print campaign, the employee picture is the dominant element. The print ads also incorporate a new logo that Iowa Health executives hope will boost awareness that the hospital group runs Iowa Methodist Medical Center, Iowa Lutheran Hospital and Blank Children’s Hospital.