Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford is a world-renowned teaching hospital, long considered one of the best children’s hospitals in the world. With their massive expansion, they more than doubled their size. More important was the fact that by incorporating the latest technology, advances in patient-centered design and sustainability, they moved from being one of the best hospitals in the world, to being the best hospital in the world. Our job was to tell this story to a local and national audience. This is a sampling of our broadcast television advertising as part of a fully integrated campaign including out of home, digital video, paid social, earned social, local and digital radio, podcasts, print, and partnerships with media such as the New York Times and the Atlantic.

We wanted to get across the fact that this was the best children’s hospital in the world, but wanted to be careful about not appearing to brag. As such, we formed the statement into a question and anchored our campaign with a line that asked “How do you build the best children’s hospital in the world?”, and then went on to answer the question with all the advances and thought that went into building this new hospital.

Visually, the photography focuses on the architectural and technological beauty and complexity of the new hospital by showing the vast open spaces, flooded with natural light (indoor and outdoor), as well as top-of the-line surgical suites and medical technology.

To tie our visuals back to our “How to build the best children’s hospital” campaign direction and to speak to the fact that this is a children’s hospital, we introduced building block shapes to contain our imagery and add pops of color. With these blocks, we created playful, dynamic compositions that appear as if a child had actually built the visual out of wooden building blocks.

And finally, we wanted a tone that was different than the perpetually happy and hopeful tone found in nearly all hospital and healthcare advertising. We explained the tone we went for to one of the pediatric liver transplant doctors. We said, “we don’t want this to be all happy and Pollyanna. We want this to be…badass.”. She lit up and said, “Good. Because when people bring their kids here, they don’t want sunshine and unicorns. It’s serious if they come here. They want badass.”

We are still gathering results from this campaign.