New medical ads focus on speed and convenience for patient

A frazzled mom with screaming children in a grocery store. A giant, walking pee cup named Petey. Happy, smiling people relaxing in a field.

They're all in new ads for clinics showing up recently in magazines, on street corners and on billboards around the Twin Cities.

The campaigns for HealthPartners, Fairview Clinics and Park Nicollet Health Services focus on speed and convenience for the patient, two traits health care isn't usually known for. They're also moving away from more traditional advertisements, which tend to tout technology and physicians' credentials, and emphasizing consumerism at a time when people are paying more out-of-pocket for medical care.

"You're seeing the softer side of health care," said Howard Liszt, a University of Minnesota professor who specializes in advertising. Liszt said he isn't sure whether the newer ads will be more effective, but "what they're addressing are real issues that patients have today."

"People want to know how they're going to be treated," he said. "And not just medically treated, but what the personal interactions are going to be."

Showing real people

Both Park Nicollet's "I Need to Know" ads and the Fairview campaigns focus on "real people."

Mark Hansberry, vice president of strategy marketing and communications for Fairview, said the rising cost of health care means more people are sharing the burden with their employers through higher deductibles, copays and co-insurance, forcing them to "take on a more personal level of accountability in health care."

People "are becoming much more savvy and more informed about their health-care decisionmaking," he said. "They want to have health care on their terms, whether it's evening appointments or same-day test results."

All three clinics said their market research had shown patients are becoming more demanding as they take on a bigger share of the medical bill.

Selling health care like cereal

As a result, Liszt notes, some of the ads are "starting to look like ads for breakfast cereals."

Consumer needs addressed

Carol Greenland, vice president for marketing and communication at Park Nicollet Health Services, said their ads target specific expectations of health care consumers.

"It goes back to what patients care about," she said of the campaign. "We know [mammogram results] are important to women ... we know that parents worry about antibiotics."

Michael Atkinson, creative director at Clarity Coverdale Fury, the Minneapolis-based agency that developed the "I Need to Know" ads, said the new batch of ads creates a "sense of opening up and showing a little more humanity." The challenge, Atkinson said, was creating images that would make people say, "Yes, that's a snapshot out of my life."

Using larger-than-life humor

The latest HealthPartners campaign, launched last month, includes life-sized mascots Petey the Pee Cup and Pokey the Syringe and promotes an updated patient services website.

Campaign shows results

Larissa Rodriguez, director of care delivery marketing at HealthPartners, said the company felt traditional advertising wasn't getting the message out strongly enough.

"They came up with 'a new way to look at health care,' and this idea of spectaculars," she said. Hence the larger-than-life specimen cup and syringe.

The unusual campaign is showing results. Patient registrations for HealthPartners' online services in May were up 82 percent over 2007, Rodriguez said.