• by Les Luchter , May 22, 2023

Boston Medical Center (BMC) Is “Rewriting Healthcare” in ads that launched Monday, mainly out-of-home at main Boston commuter hubs, as well as via digital and social.

The ads, created by Base Design with media buying by Connelly Partners, are the first salvo in a four-phase campaign that will run through February 2024.

Rachel Felix, who joined BMC last August as its first-ever chief marketing officer, tells Marketing Daily that the month-long phase 1 -- consisting of ads with “Rewriting Healthcare” as the only line -- aims to “reintroduce” BMC, since the healthcare provider hasn’t run any branding campaign for some seven or eight years.

Boston Medical Center, located in the city’s South End,  is a 514-bed nonprofit  hospital that was formed in 1996 through the merger of Boston City Hospital and Boston University Medical Center.

Breaking away from healthcare advertising’s “traditional blue backgrounds and white coats,” the first ads aim to “pique people’s interests for the meat of the campaign,” Felix says.

That meat will break in phase 2 when BMC actually begins “rewriting healthcare…changing the narrative both literally and figuratively,” according to Felix.

These ads, running from mid-June through July and then again in September, will feature lines expressing healthcare’s perceived “status quo,” but with words crossed out to reveal a new message of “how we’re doing healthcare differently.’

Thus, “Doctors Who Don’t Get You” is shown with “don’t” crossed out, so the line becomes, “Doctors Who Get You.”

Other Phase 2 messages will include:

• Quality Care is a Lifesaver for People Who Can Afford It

• ·      Patients Feel Their Voices Don’t Matter in Decisions

• Research Rarely Represents Diversity and Doesn’t Serve Everyone

Phase 3, to run in October and November, will zero in on BMC’s attributes and expertise, with dozens of words serving as an adjective for the key word “care.” These will range from “innovative” and “equitable,” to “orthopedic” and “neurology,” to “financial” and “community.”

Finally, phase 4, to run in January and February of next year, will “bring our patient voices into the campaign,” Felix says, as they “highlight what ‘rewriting healthcare’ means to them .”

In one preview ad, “Jane, patient” says that BMC has “Doctors who care about my everyday thriving.”

Felix says that the campaign as a whole is mainly targeted at such current patients: “We really believe they deserve to know the great clinical care that they can receive.”  But, “we also are hoping to attract new patients, patients that live near Boston Medical Center and patients that care about our mission in providing equitable care to all."