Posts Tagged ‘HCB Health’

HCB Health Wins Seven Rx Club Awards

HCB Health won seven awards at this year’s Rx Club Exhibition and Awards Ceremony, an international competition recognizing creative excellence in medical advertising.

The VASER it Campaign Makes a Splash

We claimed top prize in the direct-to-consumer print category, winning a silver medal for “VASER it,” a campaign created for Sound Surgical Technologies’ VASER body shaping systems. The campaign also won an Award of Excellence in the Integrated Campaigns category, continuing a winning streak that began in April when “VASER it” received a MANNY award from the editors of Med Ad News for the best medical device campaign of 2011.
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HCB Participates in the 2011 Komen Race for the Cure

HCB Health's Race for the Cure T-Shirt Design

HCB participated in the 2011 Komen Race for the Cure for the second year in a row on Sunday, November 13. This year the race was back downtown, following a course that wound around the Texas Capitol and a range of historic buildings. The stately surroundings highlighted the significance of this worldwide event.

We proudly ran and walked with 1,200 survivors and nearly 18,000 participants in support of the fight against breast cancer. Our team grew to 23 members this year, and we not only met our fundraising goal of $1,250, but surpassed it. We contributed $1,695, thanks to HCB matching all funds raised!

Most Donations Stay in Central Texas

The final tally isn’t in yet for the total donations made to the Komen Austin affiliate, but since 1999, they have provided more than $10.5 million in funding to local community clinics, hospitals and health care organizations for breast screening, diagnosis, treatment and research for the cure.

• Seventy-five percent of funds raised in Austin provide funding for underserved men and women in Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties.
• Twenty-five percent of funds raised go to the national Susan G. Komen for the Cure^® Grants Program, which supports groundbreaking breast cancer research.

Hospital Websites: Beauty is in the Eye of the User

In April, we featured a blog post entitled What Do Consumers Want from a Health Plan Website?, which encouraged health plan companies to tailor their sites to consumer needs. But hospitals and clinics should also ensure that their sites don’t leave a user feeling confused and frustrated.

Hospitals face a complex balancing act. On one hand, visitors to a hospital website want to accomplish many tasks, including finding a doctor, getting directions, making an appointment and evaluating the hospital. But they also want clear and concise pages that are user-friendly. In the information age, in which 140 character tweets and text messages rule the air, people want a multitude of information in quick spurts.

The problem is that hospital stakeholders may not even realize that there’s a problem! It becomes automatic for them to click through a series of links or deal with a messy homepage. The best strategy for an employee wishing to revamp the site is to sit down and pretend to be a prospective patient. Picture yourself as a mom whose kid has a weird-looking rash or someone with an emergency.

Once you have taken on a persona, look at your site with their eyes, and focus on four main questions: Continue reading »

Taking a Broad-Spectrum Approach to Healthcare Marketing

Change is everywhere.

Click the image to read the article in full.

Pharma pipelines are thinner, devices are gaining in sophistication, hospital systems are preparing for healthcare reform and insurers are looking to build their brands before 2014 health exchanges come into effect. What does this mean to us, the brilliant minds who build strategies and brand preferences for healthcare clients? Opportunity.

At HCB Health, we practice broad-spectrum healthcare marketing to gain a fuller understanding of the interconnected parts that contribute to improved health. In fact, we wrote an article about it for the MM&M Viewpoint.

Join the conversation below, if you’re so inclined. Thanks.

Email, E-mail and the Fight for Consistent Verbiage

Email or e-mail? Web site or website? Who sets the standard and how important is it to comply?

Hand-in-hand with societal and technological progress, new words emerge and become a part of our general lexicon. Digital and social media terms are the most obvious example of this.

Though digital media terminology is an ever-growing list, some of these “modern” words have been around for a while now. Most of us are comfortable seeing e-mail, email, website, Web site, internet and Internet, without really knowing which spelling is correct or even stopping to think about whether a correct spelling exists. Continue reading »

10 Ways to Pursue Great Creative for Healthcare Advertising

Though advertising has evolved beyond traditional print to more digital experiences, the holy grail is still the BIG IDEA. But how do you find it? Where do the ideas come from? How do you avoid sameness? How do you spur inspiration? Here are ten ideas you should consider. Some of them might surprise you.

1. Put down the trade journal

There’s nothing new in there that you haven’t already seen. Maybe a few new shots of the beach but that’s about it. I suggest you spend time with five publications that you normally wouldn’t look at. You’ll open yourself up to new voices and perspectives.

2. Move around

Get away from your desk. Go outside. Trade spaces with someone. Anything to force yourself to be around new surroundings. Sometimes a completely different kind of lighting will change your mood and spark the imagination. Continue reading »

Our “Manny” Secrets of Winning

Our agency was poppin’ champagne last week after a proud moment in New York — we took home our first ever Manny Award!  In the category of “Best Medical Device Campaign,” our VASER consumer brand campaign secured the hefty trophy — beating out both RosettaWishbone (for a Smith+Nephew campaign) and Beacon Healthcare Communications (for their BreathTek creative). A proud moment indeed.

So what was our secret to taking home the goods? Continue reading »

iH3 Party Recap and Stats from #SXSWh

The layout of the new HCB Health HQ helped foster conversations and comfortable networking.

What a whirlwind March has been so far.

Our party, the Interactive Health Happy Hour (iH3), drew hundreds of health influencers from across the world. Reviews were great, and we’re proud of our efforts with HealthTap to help fill the void of healthcare events at SXSWi. Check out the photos and tag your friends. Continue reading »