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From the editors of Healthcare Advertising Review, the Big Book of Hospital and Healthcare Advertising allows you to look under the hood of some of the most influential and creative hospital and healthcare advertising from 2001 and 2002. See and understand the trends in advertising that are shaping the finance industry today.

• 250 fully illustrated pages
• Over 90 leading campaigns from across the United States
• Includes advertising from hospitals, clinics, cancer centers, senior and women’s health centers, and more
• Advertising includes newspaper, magazine, television, radio, outdoor, point of purchase, statement stuffers, and direct mail campaigns
• Oversize format: 8–1/2” x 13”
• Perfect Bound Soft Cover
• Price: $89.95 + postage and handling
• Click here for detailed summary of the Big Book

Order your copy today by calling toll-free 800-328-3211 x 156 or by printing and mailing our convenient order form! Click here for order form.

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Healthcare Advertising Review Subscriptions

Big Book of Banking & Financial Services Advertising
From the editors of Financial Advertising Review

Hospital ad trends in the spotlight

The new Big Book of Hospital & Healthcare Advertising takes the reader through 250 pages of advertising that show some very clear trends in the tone and themes of ads created for use in print media, in broadcast and on television. The Big Book is published by The Business Word.

The Big Book’s mission is to create a resource to help the reader spot and evaluate those trends, and put them to work. The publishers believe it’s instructive and valuable for the reader to be able to see, in a single collected volume, the campaigns created by some of the nation’s most innovative healthcare institutions and most creative advertising producers. The Big Book reveals amazing consistency in the design and themes used by hospitals over the past two years. Whether hospitals were merging into a larger system or fighting to maintain their individuality, the major themes were high-touch, expressed in the words "caring," "close," and "you." The word “experience” showed up a lot, too, and it tends to point toward the other element that hospitals needed to use in differentiating themselves from their competitors: high-tech. By emphasizing experience, the hospitals put the spotlight on their well-trained staffs, their doctors, and their investments in state-of-the-art technology.

New branding campaigns contained in the Big Book invariably used taglines containing one or more of these words. For example, "Experience. Better Care," "Exceptional Medicine. Extraordinary Care," And, "Celebrating 100 years of caring."

Most hospital ads are illustrated with photography, which emphasizes reality. They usually make use of favorite models—typically real patients, nurses and physicians.

A number of campaigns encourage people to keep using their local hospital instead of being lured away to a more-distant magnet hospital or to a big tertiary care center in another city. These campaigns often emphasize geographic proximity along with other qualities. For example: "The specialists you need, right where you need them." "Specialists at heart…close at hand" and "Superior Care. Right here, Right Now." Finally, there was this tagline, which was dramatic both for its simplicity and its clever play on words: "Right Now. Right Here."

Where choices of art needed to be made, personality prevailed over technology. Doctors and nurses were the stars of almost every hospital’s campaign. Their flattering photos were seen singly or in groups or collages, alone at their work or with patients. The national nursing shortage crisis was met with ad campaigns depicting the heroic aspects of healthcare.

Patients and their stories also were popular in the ads of 2001 and 2002. There seems to be no end to the list of grateful patients willing to tell their personal stories on behalf of the hospital that helped them. Most of these ads use photos, but in one campaign, the major image is the patient's handwritten diary.

Exceptions to the themes mentioned above include a fair number of ads that focus on technology, using clinical digital images. Most are from cancer centers, which naturally want to put even greater emphasis on their state-of-the-art capabilities. Other ads make their point using humor, or convey their message with distinctive use of typefaces. We’ve seen ads using images of Barbie dolls, fresh fruit, sunglasses and liquor bottles. Generally, the offbeat approaches are found in specialty ads for services such as sleep centers, rehabilitation facilities and mental health services.

Advertising changes as society’s needs and perceptions change. It is instructive to examine some underlying reasons for what hospitals are doing today. Photographs of actual physicians and nurses may help to make hospitals seem more human, to counter patients' feelings of alienation (“I’m just a number to them,” or “They don’t care who I am, they only care about the money they make off me”) and their resentment over the high cost of hospitals. Showing real doctors and real nurses helps get across the message that hospitals are expensive because they pay a lot of money to maintain excellent staffs of excellent people. Words of caring and concern may be more valued than ever in a time when terrorism occupies our daily news. And, images of clinicians at work may be an important factor in encouraging more people to turn to the healthcare professions.

By Tom Rees, Co-Editor, Big Book of Hospital and Healthcare Advertising; Editor, Healthcare Advertising Review and Profiles in Healthcare Marketing.