Yes, We Know How This Looks.
Here’s a thing about Echo-Factory. We don’t typically enter advertising award shows, and there’s no wall of trophies in our lobby. We have a slightly old-fashioned belief that the best test of a healthcare ad is whether it actually did anything for the client. A brochure-pretty award winner that didn’t fill a service line or land a recruit is, to us, a $50,000 piece of wall art.
So, consider this a small exception. Two of our healthcare clients just won at the 43rd Annual Healthcare Advertising Awards. A Gold, a Silver, and a Bronze. (A whole podium!) And what we’re proud of isn’t that they won. It’s that the same work that won the trophies is also the work that did the actual job the clients hired us to do.
We’ll make this quick.
Gold: Huntington Health, “Huntington gave me my wings back.”
Huntington Health competes for attention in greater Los Angeles, in a category (regional hospital advertising) where most creative starts to look the same after a while. Doctor in a white coat. Folded hands. Headline about excellence. Maybe an award badge from some organization you’ve never heard of. You’ve seen the look.
The Gold-winning piece ran as part of a broader Huntington campaign built to stand out from exactly that landscape, and to reach the specific audiences most likely to need Huntington’s care. The brand lift study that ran alongside the campaign (with digital and traditional media buys included) showed strong recall gains in those audiences. Women. Adults 65 and up. Households in the Pasadena, Montrose, and Northeast LA corridor that anchors Huntington’s service area.
The work shifted perceptions in Huntington’s target demographic. The Gold is a bonus.
Silver and Bronze: MCHC Health Centers, Two Ads for One Optometrist.
MCHC Health Centers is a federally qualified health center serving Mendocino and Lake counties in rural Northern California. In a series of interviews with leadership, providers, and the board earlier this year, the same theme came up in nearly every conversation. Recruitment is the toughest operational challenge MCHC has. Rural geography, specialized clinical roles, a national healthcare staffing market that doesn’t love rural FQHCs.
Optometry is an exceptionally-difficult category for anyone to recruit in at the moment.
Mendocino and Lake counties needed an optometrist. They’d been looking for a while.
We ran two ads. Different formats, different jokes, same audience and the same goal: catch the eye of an optometrist scrolling a sea of identical job postings and tell them, in their own visual language, that this gig is different. The eye chart took the Silver. The Side Effects parody took the Bronze. They both did the job they were built to do.
MCHC has now hired an optometrist. They’ll be opening their optometry clinic later this year.
The medals are nice. Getting the good people of Mendocino and Lake Counties the eye care they deserve is the point.
Fine, We Liked It.
For all our grumbling about award shows, our team had fun making these, the clients had fun collaborating on them, and people actually noticed. And, honestly? We didn’t hate getting the emails in our inbox that said we’d won for our clients.
We’ll go back to pretending we’re above all this on Monday.
