Research-based Campaign Helps New Yorkers Find Answers To Home Health

Care Challenges Before They Occur

The Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY), the nation’s

largest not-for-profit home health care organization, this week launched

a new multi-media advertising campaign that will help redefine how the

home health care category speaks to patients and their families. This

new campaign addresses the most important question facing caregivers and

patients: “Now What?”

The goal of the new advertising, which will cascade across print,

broadcast, outdoor and online channels, is to empower New Yorkers so

they can begin to make informed choices about the type of care they or

their loved ones need. The “Now What?”

campaign represents the first time that home health care advertising

addresses people before the time of critical decision making, educating

them on available resources. Traditionally, advertising in this category

tells an “after the fact”

story.

Key to the campaign is a new web tool featured in all ads that will

guide consumers through a short series of questions to help them quickly

begin to get answers to their particular “Now

What” challenge, providing practical home

health care information and real solutions to the issues and problems

facing baby boomers and their parents today and tomorrow. VNSNY.ORG/ANSWERS

will guide consumers to programs and services that will address their

individual home health care needs from pre-natal care to bereavement

services.

The campaign will underscore an evolving shift in home health care from

a health care referral system to a consumer choice system. The new

advertising will deliver on the growing consumer demand for health care

in the real world. This insight led to the development of VNSNY’s

new tagline –“The Right Care Now”

– highlighting VNSNY’s

unmatched ability to deliver patient care solutions where patients need

it, when they need it and how they need it.

To help develop this new campaign and spearhead other broad initiatives

that will help to raise awareness of its broad range of services, VNSNY

hired Michael Bernstein, a seasoned marketing professional, in late

2006, as its first Chief Marketing Officer. Mr. Bernstein said that the

decision to employ a new advertising strategy was driven largely by the

growing number of patients and caregivers who want to be more actively

involved in home healthcare decisions. He believes that the underlying

drivers of this shift are Americans’ desire

to remain independent, spend less time in institutional settings and

more time at home, coupled with the uncertainty related to their own

future health care costs and needs.

“We want people to understand how important

it is for them to think about home health care the same way they think

about choosing a doctor or a hospital,” said

Bernstein. “But we also want to provide them

with the critical information necessary to make a good decision about a

home health care provider for themselves and their loved ones.”

Almost a year in development, the “Now What”

campaign benefited from extensive consumer research focused on

identifying the key questions and formidable challenges that consumers

face before and during the time they actually need to think about home

health care.

“Our research demonstrated what many in the

industry already suspected anecdotally, that most people don’t

understand the home health care category and can’t

differentiate brands,” said Bernstein.

“The challenge for us was to get consumers to

understand that they actually had a choice, and tell them why VNSNY was

the right choice to make,” explained Matt

Seiden, CEO of Seiden Advertising, the agency behind the campaign.

“Not surprisingly, this is a category where

the advertising has been very quiet and traditional,”

adds Bernstein. “We wanted to make it more

real-world, more immediate, to get people thinking about the issues.”

The integrated campaign is a multi-year effort that includes a mix of

print, radio, television, outdoor and online messages. The new web tool

and online advertising campaign was handled by Digital Pulp, a New

York-based online marketing and web development firm. The $4 million

campaign launch budget will blanket the seven counties in New York where

VNSNY provides patient services, including the five boroughs of New York

City, Westchester and Nassau counties. This represents a tremendous

investment in reaching local patients and caregivers, which if

extrapolated nationally, would be equivalent to an advertising spend in

the same time period of more than $35 million.

About VNSNY (www.vnsny.org)

VNSNY is the largest not-for-profit home health care organization in the

nation. In 2007, the organization provided 2,248,000 professional home

visits to more than 131, 600 patients from pre-natal to end-of-life.

Licensed by the New York State Department of Health, VNSNY is fully

accredited by the Community Health Accreditation Program (CHAP) of the

National League for Nursing. The agency was established in 1893 by

Lillian D. Wald, the founder of public health nursing in the United

States. For more information on VNSNY, please call 800-675-0391 or visit www.vnsny.org.