Bringing Humor to Healthcare Marketing for Vivify Health
“All humor is risk.”
That’s something Atomicdust Partner/Creative Director Mike Spakowski says sometimes when our team is debating where to take a project.
Being funny is risky. You don’t know if the joke will land, if people will understand it, or worse, be offended.
It’s especially true in healthcare marketing, where humor isn’t often used. But sometimes doing the unexpected leads to the best results—like in a recent project for Vivify Health.
Healthcare marketing for Vivify Health
Vivify’s remote patient monitoring (or RPM) tools give doctors and practitioners frequent and timely updates on patients’ health from far away, instead of waiting weeks until the next visit.
It’s a helpful tool anytime. And then Covid-19 happened.
The pandemic only emphasized the importance of RPM: providers need to keep their waiting rooms from overcrowding and give patients an alternative to in-person visits. There’s a financial benefit too. Many healthcare organizations are struggling with dramatic declines in appointments, meaning less money coming in. Offering RPM gives organizations a way to maintain revenue.
Vivify wanted to promote how the company’s remote patient monitoring technology solves multiple provider pain points at once.
Communicating with Comedy
We got a call from Vivify’s team asking us to help create healthcare marketing videos to share on social media and promote its RPM tools to its audience.
The videos had a few requirements. First, they needed to be attention-getting and funny to catch the interest of healthcare executives and physicians—an audience we knew from experience to be elusive online.
The videos also needed to clearly be about Vivify’s remote patient monitoring tools. Vivify explained that audiences frequently assume Vivify is promoting traditional telemedicine tools. Communicating the “not just telemedicine” message in the videos was key.
And there were risks. We didn’t want the videos to offend doctors or patients in exchange for humor. But we knew an unconventional approach with comedy would be the best way to create a memorable message and catch viewers’ attention.
We started brainstorming ideas that could check all the boxes.
From Concept to Page to Screen
A one-minute video script is usually only a page or two, but every second counts when you’re trying to grab attention. We wrote and rewrote, debating word choices and finessing the balance of humor and messaging.
With the scripts in place, we partnered with Spot Content Studio to produce the videos. Normally, the client would be on set throughout the shooting and editing process, but travel restrictions meant that wasn’t possible. So just like in the videos, we relied on tech to make it work.
Masks and social distancing made the video shoot different than we were used to, but Spot had done so much pre-planning, down to the minute, that everything went smoothly. And the team was laughing so hard throughout the shoot that we knew the humor worked.
Take a look at the final videos:
Portraying situations that anyone can relate to (Zoom call fails and embarrassing moments), we were able to convey the benefits of Vivify’s tools in a new, engaging and topical way.
An added bonus, the videos dispel the myth, held by patients and providers alike, that RPM might be invasive—without having to spell it out.
We loved working with Vivify and Spot to give a fresh spin to healthcare marketing. We’re looking forward to making more videos that help Vivify connect with its audience and advance healthcare.
