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What Health Care Pros Can Learn from the Super Bowl

By Brian Burrell

This year, I along with millions of viewers tuned into one of the biggest events in the world, Super Bowl 47.  Companies routinely spend over  $3.5 million a commercial for the privilege of being seen on 110 million television sets in the U.S. alone. With many of those 110 million people watching the game “just for the ads” and annual day-after ad roundups, it’s easy to see why the Super Bowl is so popular with advertisers.

 

But what does health care have to do with the Super Bowl?

With potentially 42 million people newly eligible for Medicaid and health insurance

subsidies, this year will be of Super Bowl proportions in the health care world.[i]

This year Young Invincibles and many others want to make sure everyone enrolls and gets covered. Here’s the information you need to know:

 

  • Exchanges will change the way we shop for insurance. States will have a website where you can compare plans and find out what you’d actually be paying and getting. Think a Travelocity for health insurance.
  • Medicaid will expand to people making under $15,000. If you’re married or have kids, your income limit would be even higher. However, not every state is expanding Medicaid so check out this map to see if yours is participating.
  • For people making up to $44,000, tax credits called Subsidies will be available to help make health insurance more affordable. These will go into effect regardless of what state you live in. You can use this calculator to get an estimate to see if you’d be getting a subsidy and how much it will be.

Although many organizations don’t have a few million dollars lying around, we can learn from the Super Bowl-esque marketing and get creative about how they get information out to people.

Although big businesses are buying up ads space to have access to millions during the big game, they’re not overlooking social media.  It’s no secret that young adults love social media and with 92% of young adult internet users on social networking sites, more and more organizations, including Super Bowl advertisers are looking to find a way to reach those users.

So how did companies get these people talking about them?

Remember this commercial?

  • At the end, Audi left the #SoLongVampires hashtag on the screen.
  • The hashtag was used 4,000 times that night and Twitter mentions of Audi in general quadrupled from the launch of the commercial.

This campaign was fairly passive but some companies have gone further to engage their audiences.

For the past 7 years, Doritos has crowd-sourced their Super Bowl ads with the Crash the Super Bowl video contest. For this contest, anyone can submit an ad and winners receive a money prize, this year it’s $1 million. Last year’s contest winner made his commercial for only $20! These consumer-engaging campaigns encourage community participation and discussion and build an affiliation for the brand.

So how can health organizations get in on this action? Organizations need to establish a presence on social media websites and include a diverse number of platforms.

The CDC provides a great example of how to incorporate the different resources. They provide information on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn and developed their own widgets and content to take onto other websites.

This diversity is important in reaching different audiences since not everyone engages on the same social media networks. Building community participation is a pretty effective tool as well.

We’ve started to spread the word, but there’s still more work to be done getting the word out. What are some ideas you have about getting the word out about health care?

 



[i] Estimate from YI calculations of CPS data.