Health care: Marketing from the front lines

Support for health care workers grew as the pandemic hit New York City.getty images

It’s a time of profound change. Perhaps nowhere is that more true than within America’s $3.6 trillion health care industry, which accounts for 18% of U.S. GDP and is one of the country’s biggest employers.

Sports are all about heroes, and with nearly 600 front-line health care workers dead from COVID-19 during the pandemic, it’s clear who the new heroes are. In the field, fear of contagion has finally made telemedicine a reality, and while health care providers did an admirable job supporting home quarantine, now they face the alternate reality of having to convince patients that medical practices are again safe.

Health care has for years been a routine sponsorship category for sports properties. With medical facilities facing new and unprecedented strains on resources, Sports Business Journal gathered six top health care marketers from across the country to discuss how their businesses — and the connections between sports marketing and medicine — are transforming. 

What follows are excerpts of that discussion, edited for clarity and brevity.

SBJ: The thought here is that the pandemic has changed health care marketing through sports.

Manny Rodriguez: Sports marketing in Colorado is how we do business. Every single one of our health care systems has been impacted with huge financial losses. We can all probably echo that as we look to redefine our marketing.

Perception: Hospitals are stuffed; they’re doing great. Reality: High-margin elective procedures that generate profit were displaced by the pandemic. Actually, health care is hurting, right?

Georgina Gonzalez-Robiou: It’s hard for people to understand, when you are providing care to so many and people are staying in your hospital. The length of stay [for pandemic patients] is astronomical, and you really don’t make money by keeping people for a long period. The idea is to treat them effectively and get them rehabbing in an outpatient setting.

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez: The impact on budgets of the [pandemic] crisis is going to be very high. And it’s going to force us to reassess the way we market and where we put our priorities. We don’t really have visibility about what’s going to happen with budgets, because we’re reassessing priorities. We’re focusing a lot on acquisition and conversion more than brand-building in the short term. That impacts where you put your dollars. Sports properties do not necessarily help you there. They’re more about long-term brand building and creating a presence in your market.

Roman Fry: You’ll see less activity among health care systems. Among the health insurers, though, you’re going to see an uptick. They actually have more funding right now and more dollars in-house because of the low utilization [during the pandemic]. You’re not paying out as many claims. However, there’s a headwind coming for next year. There’s a belief that coming out of COVID, people are going to do checkups more frequently. So we need to save up some dollars. Still, they’re likely going to have more dollars right now to spend.

David Mueller: As we got through the first four or six weeks of COVID and kind of the reactionary nature from the clinical side and then from the business side, we certainly had an assessment on budget, for what that looks like the balance of 2020. We’ll have to think differently to get through this year.  … If there’s a great idea there, we’re going to get funding for it. Who knows what budgets are looking like as we get to back of next year? 

Amy Comeau: We are official sponsors and team providers for the Atlanta Hawks, Falcons, Braves, and Dream. The Hawks and the Falcons are long-term relationships. The budgets keeping those going isn’t really going to change. For the ones that we have shorter sponsorships with, certainly, how they activate and how they support us will come into play. We were only 10 weeks into the coronavirus and starting to see the financial impact. We know what our losses are, but we also know that we’re already getting back up to 70% of our surgeries. The next year or so will be leaner than usual, and so will its likely impact on how we activate.

Of course, our teams aren’t back to live game play yet, either, so we’ve had to be really creative in how we’re activated. Those who’ve got the long-term deals, those won’t go anywhere any time soon. Those are the relationships where it’s been a true partnership, and in some ways during COVID-19 while we are the sponsors of those teams, those teams became the sponsors of us. In our market, the teams get as much brand equity from being partnered with Emory Healthcare as we get from them.

Rodriguez: Everyone on this call is probably easily losing millions of dollars a day. So it’s hard to get a grasp on, during one of the largest pandemics in the history of the world, health care systems not making money. But most health care systems have laid people off; they’ve furloughed people; they’ve done a lot of different things to try and stay in business.

The health care category is being redefined. Everybody’s talking about budgets and all of that, and I think everybody’s CFO here probably would love to see us not do these, while everybody’s C-suite will support it. The category’s changing. What might have been worth X tomorrow, is going to be worth X minus 20. A lot of hospital systems that were playing in this space may not have the money to do it anymore. This category really will look different when you have only a handful of people in the market who can compete. I don’t think the teams will probably acknowledge that or want to admit it, as all of our deals come up, or if we have an opportunity now to extend deals, I think values with deals are going to be very, very different.

Comeau: With some of these teams, the health care category is really crowded. We might be the official team provider, official health care provider, but then they might also have a formal urgent care, or an official eye doctor [as fellow sponsors]. … I’d actually welcome some of that weeding out so that there’s less competition and less clutter among the health care brands.

Emory's Amy Comeau, Roman Fry of CareAllies, UCHealth's Manny Rodriguez, New York-Presbyterian's Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez, Ochsner's David Mueller and Georgina Gonzalez-Robiou of Baptist Health South Florida..uchealth

Health care workers are the new heroes. Has that actually produced an increase in consumer trust?

Ruiz-Jimenez: Trust in our institutions across the board has gone up. Most trusted people are doctors. It’s put us in a good position. We’ve always been the good guys … we’re not the insurance company, nor the cable company. Previous to this, we were always already in a good spot somehow with consumers. It’s given us more credibility. The problem is our systems are overstretched, and it’s hard to really capitalize on that.

Gonzalez-Robiou: This crisis has afforded us brand equity. Six months ago, hospital and health care websites were not the first place people went for information. Now they are, because they trust the information that we’re giving them. It’s based on expertise and science.

Rodriguez: When this pandemic started, I kept quoting the term to my team — none of them knew what I was talking about, because they’re all millennials — that this is our Tylenol moment. This is our opportunity to redefine who we are. We’ve been fortunate enough to be given kind of the rights to be the expert while we were battling it out in the market. Now, when we are seeing 90% share voice, people are coming to us as experts; now is our opportunity to seize that. 

I assume everyone’s marketing is converting from hero to recovery messaging?

Mueller: We’ve had certain front-line morale-boosting messages that we’ve leveraged from players, executives, and coaches thanking the heroes. That’s transitioned into some PSAs really pushing for the needs like “We have a blood shortage and critical needs there.”

I talked to [partners] the Saints and the Pelicans almost every day over the course of this time — they’ve already got a great production strength. And so beyond what we have contractually and how we reinvent the value … is really now leveraging the new realities in the digital space. Overall, what we’re learning through the trying times now are new strengths about content and new ideas in general. 

Comeau: Depending on what part of the curve we’re on, we’re using different creative. It started with our “Flatten the Curve, Georgia” campaign, then it was “Rising to the Call,” thank you and heroism imagery. Now, we’ve moved into our safety and recovery message. It’s reassuring people to not delay your care. If you need to come in, come in, but trust your doctor. If your doctor says we can do this by telehealth, then you can do it by telehealth. If they need you to come in, know it will be safe.

Rodriguez: Initially, we shut down everything, and basically reallocated all of our resources to a communicate and educate strategy. Our goal as an academic medical center was to become the source of truth in the state, and everything we did, whether it was through social media, whether it was through PSAs, whether it was through the teams, whatever you could think of, was about speaking the truth because there was a lot of fake news, right? Now we’ve transitioned to this reassurance. We had one woman who had a minor eye injury that turned into her losing her eye after not coming in. So, we started with the message of “you have to seek care.” We’re focused on reassuring people, letting them know we’re open, we’re safer than ever.

Broncos player Brandon McManus delivers meals to UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital employees.uchealth

Any team sponsor has to be considering how they can activate at games without fans.

Gonzalez-Robiou: Part of what I look for when I review a sponsorship or a naming-rights opportunity is how can we engage [fans] … So, how do we do that now virtually? It’s really requiring us to take our digital and virtual games to the next level, and find a way to run a promotion around a game no one’s attending. As part of our recovery efforts, we highlighted someone from the NBA. Udonis Haslem from the Heat became very active when the pandemic first hit here in Miami. And he’s been the most appropriate voice for a recovery spot. So, we reached out and were able to get him on board. And we did the same thing for a Spanish spot with a player [from] Inter Miami, which is an interesting relationship. The weekend that they were going to launch their inaugural [home game], they didn’t. … But we’ve been leaning into the relationships and realizing that there’s a lot of mutual benefit even during this time where their businesses are as disrupted as ours.

Rodriguez: We’re all going to have to reinvent ourselves in terms of how do you create that virtual experience. They say the average person watching a football game at home is watching four screens. How do you disrupt that person who’s following fantasy football, watching one game, Red Zone on the other, and playing “Madden 20” in the other screen? I think part of our challenge is without knowing when these teams are coming back or how they’re coming back, it’s hard to create a plan. But what will be a challenge for us is how do we disrupt audiences that are already very distracted?

Ruiz-Jimenez: There’s so much that you can do in digital. How do you take it to another level? For us, a big opportunity was going grassroots, and actually using the equity of the teams to touch people, kids, and families, and send the message that we were there for their health. Now we cannot do that. So, it’s how do we take that equity from the teams and how else do we use it. 

Comeau: When we go to live games, I’m concerned around what’s going to happen. Will the networks, or the leagues, take over that inventory? Then all of us who have had inventory at our home games may miss that. 

There needs to be more innovative ways in social media for the teams to allow us to activate. Leagues are going to have to figure out how to relax some of their restrictions on how the teams can activate with their sponsors on social media, because there’s some stuff that we’ve been limited to what we can do. It’s really going to be in that digital space, whether it’s social, live game-play streaming, those types of things, but even old-fashioned stuff could work. Like, can I do a direct-mail piece to season-ticket holders?

Gonzalez-Robiou: A gaming piece is going to be valuable. We’ve been shy getting in that space. It seems like a good way to regain some value. The demographics just don’t align exactly with what we would normally market to, and the reality is that within sports, those are the types of virtual gaming experiences that we would align our brand with. The shoot-’em-up games don’t align.

Fry: I’ve been a part of groups looking at, “Where does our consumer spend time?” Look at places where local adult sports are on the rise. I’ll give an example of pickleball. There’s like a 12% compounding annual growth rate, if you will, a rise in people playing in adult sports. Now, I think we’re up to 3 or 4 million Americans. Not huge, right? Not a large percent of the population, but you see [it] in certain locations and communities. I’m not saying pickleball is the answer to all marketing to seniors, but thinking a little bit more locally. We’ve got to think a little bit more outside the box, because those sports are going to go on. We’re looking really community by community, if that makes sense, and looking for opportunities that are unique.

Emory Healthcare staff speak with members of the Atlanta Hawks organization during a Zoom call at the hospital.emory healthcare

There will be new emphasis on health and sanitation at any venue, with or without fans. Are properties looking to you for guidance?

Gonzalez-Robiou: When it came to infection control early on, obviously that is part and parcel of health care. Infection control. We felt comfortable telling the teams or working with the teams on sending them some protocols. [Now], we’re certainly involved, with soccer especially, and NASCAR and a couple of other partners, in helping with testing. We are their health care partner and we committed to being the team captain for their health care.

Are we going to give them a Good Housekeeping seal of approval? I don’t think we will, because we are not giving ourselves a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. The reality is that we’re taking the steps that we need to keep our team and our patients safe. We can’t control their environments, so while we can help them design an experience that may be safer, I don’t think that we want to take the responsibility ourselves to put a stamp on a stadium or a locker room.

Comeau: We’re going to play a role in how the teams come back, right? And they’re going to be looking to us, not just with health screenings with the players and the stuff that we would normally do, but … to help them get people back into their facilities, too, and say, “Yes, not only is it safe to get back into the hospitals, but now it’s safe to go back into the stadiums.”

Marketing ROI measures are always elusive, so I’m interested in knowing your KPIs, and if those have changed.

Comeau: Brand awareness, because that’s easier to measure; it’s harder to measure the connection from somebody watching a game, seeing activation on-site and then turning into a patient, although that’s the holy grail. It’s patient acquisition, that we can say that this fan saw our messaging and then became a patient. But we certainly look at impressions and we’re partnering with our business school at Emory to look at is there an academic way to look at the impact.

The other piece that we’re starting to look at is revenue through fundraising. How do charitable donations to us impact, and that’s tangible when we look at dollars coming from team foundations into our systems, like what  happened a lot during COVID. 

Ruiz-Jimenez: Our major KPI is brand awareness. It’s very, very hard to link this back to anything else. We’re trying to do some work on retention and trying to link fandom, and provide some type of a relationship with the teams through us. But it’s really hard to go beyond that.

Mueller: The level of trust that goes with brand awareness. I think we’ve seen some good results on statistics that we’ve seen from our build within the Superdome, just visually, and the way that we message around that as well. We’ve seen tremendous growth, not only from the broad brand awareness perspective, but we’ve already put an onus behind the digital and the social metrics, and engagements and impressions. We’ve evolved some of our content and storytelling pieces to really engage further, we’ve seen great results there.

Fry: For us it’s awareness and patient engagement. Are they staying engaged with their primary care physician through some channel, whether that be telephonic or virtual? We’re trying to engage that audience and make sure they know their provider can see them through multiple channels.

Gonzalez-Robiou: Brand awareness is great, but brand awareness actually doesn’t pay the bills. Really, conversion is where it’s at. So how can we prove that it is a subset of the fan base of ticket holders? Can we do tracers through CRM to see if the encounter with the brand was after a game, or after a promotion? We haven’t figured that one out yet. 

As the pandemic hopefully winds down, health care messaging transitions to what?

Ruiz-Jimenez: We look at the sports marketing as a pyramid where you have professional teams at the top, then you have a layer with the universities and the relationship you can create with those. And then we go to what would be grassroots sports, literally whoever you can tackle there. Our objective is to be able to play at those three levels and extend our sponsorships. An activation actually proposes a sponsorship down to that level. It’s been more about working with the platforms of the teams and how did we get them to help us spreading some messaging. They’ve been fantastic at helping us with that. But it’s very hard to look beyond that.

Rodriguez: We’re all in the notion of how do we get people back in the door. We’ve gone months of being down 40%, 50%, 60%. Part of that is reassurance. We got to reassure that the hospital’s safe. And you know, in our market, the smart teams have come to us and said … “How can we help you achieve your goals?” knowing that they can’t deliver. None of these teams at this point can deliver on any contractual assets that we have. We don’t even know if anybody’s playing. So, the smart ones have come to us and said, “Given that, how do we help you create value out of these relationships?” which has been an interesting thing for them to proactively do that.

To conclude, it seems appropriate to ask, what’s the answer to the “If I had known then, what I know now” question?

Comeau: I don’t think any of us expected [COVID-19] to be as widespread as it was. But had we known, we certainly would have wanted to have built our messaging playbook a lot sooner, knowing what the different cases of the curve are, having all of that creative ready so we could just traffic it as needed. But  we didn’t know that, and so now we’re all trying to react, and it’s different in each one of our markets. New York is so different from Atlanta, which is so different from a colleague of mine that lives in West Virginia. I wish we had a crystal ball, but we didn’t, and we still have a long way to go until we get through it. 

Rodriguez: I’m not even sure we know what we don’t know yet. I mean, we would have probably attacked quicker. Had we known that, back in January, when we thought that this was just another flu or something like that; if we knew then that it was going to be like this, we probably would have changed our tactics, attacked a little bit quicker, came out with different messaging … more reassurance messaging.

Ruiz-Jimenez: Really, we’re in the middle of this still. We’ve seen light at the end of the tunnel; now, we’re out of that tunnel, but there’s another big tunnel up ahead, and we don’t know how long that is. New York was probably the first city to be hit hard, so it was very hard for us to predict any of this. We would have loved to educate people a bit earlier, but I don’t see how we could have done anything differently.

Fry: Getting more channels open to connect to our patients to get our messages out. That would have been a top one. And then behind that would have been having the capabilities ready and completely turned on. Part of our business is home-based primary care, where we’re actually putting physicians in the home. We didn’t really think that there would be a case to where we wouldn’t go into the home, but that was the case for our chronic patients, it was too big of a risk. So that was cut off, so that group, you really had to engage virtually. So, in hindsight, we would’ve opened those channels a lot earlier.

Gonzalez-Robiou: Looking back, I’m really very proud of how we flipped our department completely. Maybe going a little easier on the [early] staying home messaging. I think about it, and how we could have potentially altered that message to serve both purposes, so we didn’t create a panic so that now some are dying at home. But we achieved what we needed to, which was flattening the curve. That was a huge benefit in most places. Unfortunately, in New York, they were just overwhelmed. … I definitely would’ve bought more toilet paper before. I told a friend, “I’m going to build an addition to my house and stock it with Lysol, Wet Ones, and Clorox Wipes.”