KPAX.com delivers for St. Patrick Hospital

JobSpotTV now carries video clips of employment opportunities that allow employers to brand their jobs.

Pink jerseys promoting Breast Cancer Awareness were sold at Montana Grizzlies football games.

To help promote the campaign, they registered teamupmontana.com (hosted by the partnering newspaper site). This is the flash page link from banner ads and shows pictures and stories from breast cancer survivors.

KPAX launched Healthbreak to house both its own and the hospital's video content.

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Advertiser: St. Patrick Hospital and Health Sciences Center

Site: KPAX.com, the site of KPAX-TV, a CBS affliate in Missoula, Montana
Owner: Evening Post Publishing Company
Key executive: Philip Maney, director Montana Interactive Group, the sites for CBS affiliates in Western Montana,  KPAX.com, KJA18.com, KRTV.com and KXLH.com

Summary: Increasingly top performing ad campaigns are less about "ads" than overall marketing strategies. A case in point is the marketing campaigns designed by KPAX online for St.Patrick Hospital. Meeting a variety of the hospital's marketing needs the campaign integrated St.Patrick's inhouse videos and built a popular fundraiser into a city-wide cause. The station also landed a $40,000 mostly online buy, the largest online buy for a television site in the state. 

Challenges: St. Patrick Hospital is one of two fiercely competitive hospitals in the market.  Its new marketing person wanted to solve a number of needs as she redesigned the hospital's own website:

a.“Do something different” from the other hospital. It was important to her that the hospital have exclusivity  and a unique way of promoting its brand.

b.Generate traffic to the hospital site. New, innovative content on the site communicated with visitors in personal ways; the marketing director wanted as many people as possible on the site, rather than just looking at hospital branded content on KPAX.com.

b. Build involvement in Breast Cancer Awareness month. Since the hospital has a cancer clinic and maintains survivor stories on its website, it wanted to be associated with cancer awareness activities including National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October.

c. Find employees. Print ads had not been working well to keep the busy hospital staffed, especially in non-health related service jobs, so the print budget was cut by 70%. Could Maney find a way to fill these staffing needs?

Strategy: KPAX created a proposal to the hospital to integrate all of these objectives.The program had four major components:

1. Development of a health-related channel that integrated the client's content. Moving from WorldNow's platform to Synapse meant that Maney's team would be able to create and operate a new channel more easily. But they also had lost the health content WorldNow supplied. They turned to  HealthDayTV, a syndicated service of NewsproNet, (reviewed here) that feeds two to four high quality health-related video-news items per day. The new channel, called HealthBreak, houses some of the hospital’s content, plus KPAX on-air health news spots, and the premium syndicated news from HealthDayTV.  Hospital-produced content fell into two categories:

a. “HealthBreak,” a Q&A style video interview with hospital’s doctors is produced weekly by the hospital and runs on the channel. A page of “HealthBreak” interviews resides on the hospital web site.

b. “Inspired by Life,” a series of cancer-survivor stories also promoted on the home page but linking back to the hospital site.

St.Patrick is the exclusive health-related advertiser on the site, which also carries one ad position for non-health related ROS advertisers. 

2. Teamupmontana.com to promote cancer awareness
Knowing that the hospital was interested in cancer awareness, Maney put together a co-sponsorship program that included the daily newspaper and the college football team and launched a new domain teamupmontana.com. All three entities are both paid and provide extra free promotion to support the Breat Cancer Awareness month in the fall. Ads started in March and will culminate in October, reaching a pink-hot pitch, ironically, during football season.

“Football is king aorund here,” Maney says. With no pro team the Montana Grizzlies are the defactor pro team of the state. During the games the team releases pink balloons, and media promotions - including dynamic online banners - advocate wearing pink to the game to show your support.

“The game looked like 'pink out’,” Maney says. “The color for the team was bergundy so it was kind of close.” Some of the men were less cooperative but a few guys approached the pink-shirt vendors, asking for "more of a cooler guy-looking shirt because they would have no problem wearing it.”

Maney also helped his client set up a Facebook page for teamupmontana.com. Because of “how cool it is to be a part of it” the fans have grown from both of their personal friends to to 772 virally with no outside promotion.

3. Creation of JobSpotTV
To meet the staffing needs, Maney’s team decided to execute an idea they had tossed around but never committed to: JobTV listings that allow the hospital to post job  videos on a new channel. The channel has now been launched across the three other Montana stations and acquired more listings,  including simple text with audio overlay and more interactive ads. The hospital's spot used  basic still shots of the hospital, professional photos of staff members, and 15 second videos. The hospital  themes remind applicants of the hospital's non-medical departments such housekeeping and food services.

4. Banner advertising
Finally jobs, "Team Up Montana" and other promotions are supported with banner ad buys.

Results: KPAX secured a budget of $40,000, making it the the largest buy for a television website in the state. Besides the 772 Facebook Fans, the teamupmontana.com has become a local phenomenon and helped the television station achieve its strategic goals.

Lessons learned:  

1. In some respects  television sites have an advantage over more developed newspaper sitess in creating new initiatives - no need to address complex issues involved with integrating pre-existing content with new content. The ability to create from scratch can be a plus.

2. A key to partnering with large accounts  is being able to integrate unique client content in ways that make sense for visitors. Expert Q&A's and survivor stories provided content beyond "advetorials." 

3. The ability to build and deploy new sites and channels easily is paramount to responding to market needs. A top job in the C-level office is to remove technology bottlenecks that prevent creativity. 

4. Willingness to help the client develop a social media campaign to support the media buy was important to this effort. Maney not only helped marketing set-up the page, but marketed it to his personal network (more easily done for a charitable cause than a commercial one).

5.HealthDayTV as premium content is much more dynamic than AP or other press release oriented material to balance out health coverage with local issues. Newspaper sites should be looking at broadcast techonology partners - and vice versa. 

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