Celebrating 30 years of creative advertising: #30 St. John Health.

This campaign is very special to my heart. The reason? First off, it was a very tight, hard-working campaign that broke through to create a strong brand and emotional connection for St. John Health. As a faith-based health system, what made St. John Health different in the competitive healthcare landscape was their unique approach to healing “mind, body and spirit.” We came up with the themeline, “A passion for healing,” and rolled out a campaign which used a storytelling format to emotionally connect female healthcare decision makers to the brand. One such female is also the other reason this campaign is special to me: Ellyn Davidson. When Ellyn, our managing partner, saw the memorable brand TV spot below, she was inspired to do a self-breast exam in her shower. She found a lump. And yes, it was breast cancer. Early detection is one of the reasons Ellyn has been cancer-free for 7 years. And we are all so grateful that she is.

The emotion in this campaign is undeniable. Radio stations were talking about it. Neighbors of mine told me it made them cry. Our client even made me a shadow box filled with the letters staff sent to her about how moving it was and how well it articulated their brand. That shadow box still sits in my office today. But the campaign was also smart. With a modular themeline that we used to highlight different clinical specialties, a print format that encapsulated all the nine hospitals in the health system in a book mark design and cable ad tags that used zone-targeting to effectively advertise the right local hospital to the community. It was powerful brand campaign on many levels.

I find healthcare marketing very rewarding to work on, and this campaign was a career highlight for me and the agency. What do you think of it?

To see the rest of the 30 Best of Brogan, visit our original post in this series: Celebrating 30 years of creative advertising.