Advocate Health Care

One of the priorities for fighting COVID-19 at the city level is ensuring that adequate hospital space is available for patients who need intensive care. In practical terms, this means that millions of Americans must recover from COVID at home, on their own. This can be a frightening and isolated time, especially without medical support.

“We Got You.” theme.

Visual identity for the COVID-19 prevention and awareness campaign.

To bring confidence and peace of mind to recovering COVID patients, we partnered with Advocate Health Care and the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) to providing management consulting services related to diversity and inclusion, and also to create a custom public outreach campaign to promote a range of COVID-19 informational and virtual health care options.

This program connects health workers with patients who are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms but do not require emergency or inpatient care—the vast majority of COVID patients. These patients receive daily virtual visits and, if required, wellness kits including crucial items such as thermometers, pulse oximeters, blood pressure cuffs, alcohol wipes, and masks. Informing Illinois residents about this program was an urgent communications problem, as the program could reduce long-term health consequences of COVID-19, or even save lives. Listen to the multilingual radio spots on Soundcloud here.

We were selected as a partner on this public awareness campaign because of the trust we instilled, with both Advocate and the State of Illinois, thanks to our track record of results for global brands, social proof of integrity, and portfolio of creativity. We demonstrated our ability to create for, and be accountable for, the large scale of this project, bringing together vast demographics to find a relatable and workable consensus.

Our target audience was historically underserved Illinois residents, mainly Black and Latino, to ensure we gave them confidence that the healthcare system had their back, regardless of their insurance or citizenship status, during these unprecedented times.

Meeting the diversity and expansiveness of our audience required a strong campaign foundation. We needed common ground, and found it in our campaign messaging. The cornerstone of our campaign is the slogan: “We Got You,” which translates to Spanish as “Estamos Contigo.”

Phase II billboard in Spanish for Advocate Health Care focused on how to detect COVID-19 symptoms.

Using familiar phrasing, blending the informality of close friendship with trust in the medical profession, we bridged the communications gap among dozens of communities in just three words. Most important, this familiar phrase anticipated the varying needs and questions of community members caught in a pandemic, and curbed fears and confusion with a catch-all approach to support. The culture of “We Got You” is generally understood in Spanish urban communities. To stretch to reach more multigenerational families, we conducted a robust survey across the United States with a concentration on Chicago to create the Spanish equivalent “Estamos Contigo,” which evokes family, care, and togetherness.

With a foundation in place, it became time to reckon with the logistical task of connecting with nearly two million Chicagoland residents. “We knew the Birk team was a great partner when we saw how quickly and effectively they managed the complexity of this project in a pandemic,” said Kelly Jo Golson, Chief Marketing Officer at Advocate Aurora Health. “Even as we were faced with minute-by-minute communication and information challenges posed by the global emergency, they took it all in stride and developed remarkable creative strategies.”

Time Lapse showing the installation of our massive multi cultural widespread neighborhood custom memoji campaign.

We created an integrated brand and content strategy, delivering everything from the visionary (campaign naming, brand visual identity, brand extensions like multiple campaign themes, multilingual diversity strategy, digital and programmatic ad buys, creative for all ad channels, traditional OOH, which includes direct mail campaign, television, radio, and billboards) to the nitty-gritty details (custom memoji and emoji development, animation, direct, and blogs).

Since we had such a wide selection of audience personas to capture, we had to cast a net to match. This wasn’t a one-size-fits-all campaign; it was tailored in every aspect, to ensure all members in these diverse communities receive the care required, in our shared mission with Advocate and the State of Illinois.
Bringing together internal teams with varying KPIs, working remotely, to collaborate, build, create, and deliver cohesive, on-brand results has always been one of our core strengths. We accomplish this through cloud-based collaboration in real time. Google Workspace allows our internal team and our clients to track progress, schedules, and budgets, and also have full access to creative assets, so they can use them however they are required.

Phase II billboard for Advocate Health Care focused on how to detect COVID-19 symptoms.

Execution is where deliverables align with strategy to produce results. We measured the number of people we needed to reach, and the number of people we needed to convert, and then we measured that against industry data to ascertain a spend-per-conversion estimate. Then, we backed up into the big picture view, to decide which assets were the most effective assets to create and deploy.

Projects like this bring together everything we love about our work: an important purpose, a sense of community, and a chance to use our full arsenal of tools and talents. We all have a role to play in containing the pandemic and protecting others against COVID-19, and our “We Got You” / “Estamos Contigo” campaign shows how we are able to use our skills during this public health crisis. While we hope, along with the rest of the world, that this horrible pandemic will be over as soon as possible, we stand ready to assist other healthcare companies, governments, and communities with their public communications in any way we can. “During this public health crisis, spreading truth and trust keeps people calm, and even saves lives. We couldn’t have done that nearly as effectively without Birk Creative’s partnership.”

The results of our “We Got You” / “Estamos Contigo” campaign also had even more brand extensions. Our client created a new sub-campaign, “I Got Mine,” a sticker campaign indicating who got their COVID-19 vaccination shot. Our client also rolled out our proposed call-to-action campaign with “Mask up. Wash up. Back up.” The slogan appeared on a 70-foot-tall billboard along the most heavily traveled highway in Chicago.

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About Birk Creative Birk Creative works with businesses as a plug-and-play brand strategy and management consulting team or as a complement to existing creative and marketing capabilities. We deliver wraparound services across all advertising and marketing activities: Visual identity, branding, brand messaging, custom content creation, podcast/video/radio production, social media marketing, employee thought leadership training and development, and digital advertising. Our in-house team and remote network include brand strategists, copywriters, social media marketers, podcast producers, book and publication publishers, graphic designers and web developers, illustrators, media buyers, and a 10-person remote team.

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