West Coast System Provides Guidance on Effective Online Advertising

by Mark S. Gothberg

“Four years ago our administration looked at our online presence and urged us to do more, to learn as much as we could and try different things,” says Doreen Pichotti, senior marketing analyst at UC Davis Health System, which serves the greater Sacramento, CA, area. “Since then, our online advertising as a percentage of total ad spending has grown from 6 percent to 25 per­cent. This is now in line with all-industry spending online, which is 22 percent of ad budgets compared with 26 percent of total audience time spent online, according to [venture capital firm] KPCB.”

UC Davis has taken an aggressive, proactive, and creative approach to online advertising with a yearly budget of some $500,000. What the organization has learned in its jour­ney was the subject of a presentation at the Seventeenth Annual Health­care Internet Conference in November. Joining Pichotti was Andrew Boots, Midwest senior ac­count executive for Spongecell, an interactive marketing firm. Pichotti recently updated information on her map to guide healthcare marketers in the realm of online advertising.

Create multiple online display ads

“We do as many as 50 different ads for a campaign,” notes Pichotti. The ads can be static or Flash-animated and use different concepts, sizes, formats, colors, headlines, photos, and languages.

Why so many ads? “It’s hard to come up with just one ad that meets all the [strict] requirements of the media vehicle being used. If you can create multiple ads, you can get more of a complete message out. We find that it takes at least five ads to do this,” says Pichotti.

UC Davis develops virtually all its ad creative in-house, although it does repurpose creative from its adver­tising agency, which handles the organization’s traditional advertising. The marketing team has substantial resources within the healthcare sys­tem as well as the university.

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