The client – Capital Health, a small hospital network in New Jersey – calls up and says “we’ve got these seven great surgeons we’ve recently hired and…

…they’re all women; we want to talk about that. What can we do?” 

I love it when a client gives us an open-ended problem like that.  No, really, I do. 

Because what it means is that the client trusts you to figure out something that they can’t. They know it’s important that they’ve hired these seven female surgeons. And they know that their potential customers will think it’s important too. But beyond that? 

So here’s what we figured out, before we started writing copy or thinking about layouts. Hiring this many female surgeons, for a small network, is actually refreshing. It’s progressive. It flies in the face of the old boy network. And it is just plain more appealing to the people who make most of the healthcare decisions for families in America – women. 

But how do you say any of this without saying “Hey, look! Some of our surgeons have ovaries!” 

You do it by not even talking about the fact that they’re women. In fact, by not even talking about them at all. 

If you want your decision to hire these exceptional surgeons to reflect well on your hospital, you should let the doctors themselves talk about why they chose Capital Health. Not the other way around. So we did. 

We started by throwing the original media thinking out the window – no OOH, minimal print, light on the radio. Heavy on social – with videos, custom built for facebook and Instagram. Videos of interviews with the doctors, on the floors of the hospital, talking about their story, what drew them to Capital Health, what drew them to being doctors here.

No script – totally improvised in front of the camera. Then cut together to form seven unique, distinctive stories – in a format that was nonetheless consistent, to create a cumulative impact when they showed up in your feeds. 

And it worked. The videos had more total clicks, double the estimated ad recall, and the most post engagements, reactions and shares of any campaign we’d done for Capital Health.

All of which helps us reinforce the bigger brand promise (which we also developed in a campaign begun the previous year) – that Capital Health does more to care for people in this part of the country than anyone else.