Campaign Spotlight: Campaign Just Wants to Say ‘Know’ to Kidney Disease

The campaign, now under way, was created for the National Kidney Foundation in New York by a company, also in New York, named Public Domain, which is a kind of hybrid advertising agency and a production company.

The campaign was produced almost entirely through desktop and laptop computers, Web connections and Skype, the Internet calling service. That enabled the foundation to get, for a budget estimated in the low six figures, dozens of video and audio commercials as well as print, outdoor and digital ads.

Skype also plays a leading role in the creative approach the campaign takes. The video commercials — which can be watched on television, You Tube and the foundation’s Web site, kidney.org — are composed of edited conversations on Skype.

The commercials begin and end with the sound effects that are heard by people who use Skype, including the incoming call ring and the signoff noise denoting a call’s conclusion. The videos even include, with the approval of Skype, the Skype logo in the upper right corner.

The audio commercials, intended for radio stations, also use the Skype sound effects. The audio spots, which feature the actor Ken Howard as the voice-over announcer, are based on the videos, with the dialogue spoken by actors.

In addition to working on the advertising aspects of the campaign, Public Domain also developed new graphics and a new logo for the foundation.

The goal of the campaign is to disseminate more information about both kidney disease and the foundation. For instance, the outdoor and print ads carry this headline: “One in three American adults is at risk for kidney disease. Are you the one?”

To underscore the idea that the ads are intended to impart knowledge, the theme of the campaign is “Now! You know.”

(Fun fact: For decades, the United Press International news service sent to newspapers around the country brief items that could be used to fill out columns of type if they came up short. The items, which would now probably be called factoids, carried the headline “Now You Know.”)

The campaign is the result of a strategic plan that the foundation began developing at the end of 2011, says Bruce Skyer, who became chief executive at the foundation in October 2011 after serving for a year and a half as its chief operating officer.

“We talked to volunteers, board members, staff members” and the medical community, Mr. Skyer says, “and one thing came out: We needed to raise awareness of kidney disease and the National Kidney Foundation.”

“Among those at risk, and those who actually have the disease, their knowledge is very low,” he adds, partly because “the kidney is a difficult organ to understand.”

“It does so many different things,” Mr. Skyer says, “and also, kidney disease is called a co-morbidity, because its two leading causes are diabetes and high blood pressure.”

The result of all that, he adds, is that kidney disease “sort of gets lost in the sauce.”

“There have been campaigns in the past” from the foundation, Mr. Skyer says, including a recent one that carried the theme “Love your kidneys,” but “none that have really resonated” with the estimated 26 million Americans who have kidney disease or the estimated 73 million who are at risk for it.

“We need to get to those folks,” he adds, “if we are truly the voice of the patient.”

As the strategic plan was under development, Mr. Skyer was put in touch by Bill Cella — the former chairman of the foundation who was a longtime top executive at media agencies — with Tim Davis, a onetime executive vice president for media at the Advertising Council in New York, which coordinates the ad industry’s efforts in the realm of public service campaigns.

“I called Tim up,” Mr. Skyer recalls, and told him something along the lines of this: “ ‘Here is a disease that is the ninth most common killer in the United States and nobody knows about it.’ ” Early last year, Mr. Davis joined the foundation, with the title of chief advancement officer.

(The title stems from “advancing the mission of the organization,” Mr. Davis explains, in terms of “public awareness and fund-raising.”)

The foundation needed to find a way to “simplify a complicated message,” Mr. Davis says, and at the same time “create social change” among those who are at risk.

“If they can catch it early and treat it with diet; or diet and exercise; or diet and exercise and medication, they can stop the progression,” Mr. Davis says.

Then, too, the foundation also needed to figure out “who to talk to, how to reach them in a compelling way and how to do it cost-effectively,” he adds.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/business/campaign-just-wants-to-say-know-to-kidney-disease.html?partner=rss&emc=rss