Work for hire? Just say nevER.

By Gonzalo López Martí @LopezMartiMiami

A few years back I created a little ad campaign for a local Miami hospital.

Mercy Hospital to be precise.

The beloved Catholic institution in Coconut Grove.

Prime waterfront location. Awesome views. Literally a developer’s wet dream.

The ad campaign was supposed to be a short-lived, seasonal rollout.

Nothing requiring excessive brainpower.

A tactical effort.

Yet the strategic premise behind it was pretty insightful.

It was just an unproven hypothesis at the time, but it made loads of sense: the emergency room is a hospital’s most critical touch point. The first customer experience. More so, it’s the be all & end all of customer experiences. When a patient is on his/her knees howling in pain passing a kidney stone or nursing a sprained ankle, he/she can be extremely demanding, judgemental, prickly, vindictive.

Let’s not even mention other more serious, life-threatening conditions.

Hence, a great ER experience rubs off and spills over onto the image of a hospital as a whole.

The ER is the ultimate of strategic premises in the healthcare industry (pun intended, more puns below).

It is the acid test of the brand, it sets the standard, it can build or destroy a hospital’s reputation in seconds flat.

At the time, Mercy was remodeling its ER while making considerable efforts to reduce wait times and improve the overall patient experience.

“Patient”, how apropos.

They had trained their staff, they had streamlined the paperwork, they had expanded their facilities, they had invested in new and better equipment, they had won some awards for the professionalism of their nurses, they had enhanced their overall quality of care.

Plus, they had some cheap OOH inventory to work with, mostly bus shelters along the main arteries of their zip codes of influence (it was the low season and the economy was not in great shape at the time).

So we created the attached campaign (art direction by Inés Suárez, copy by yours truly):

If my memory doesn’t fail me, we charged them something in the mid to low four figures.

There was no money for photography.

They needed a very simple and cheap idea that could be used for a few weeks to cover those vacant bus shelter positions asap.

It was just a one-off.

A seasonal tactical campaignette.

After it was launched, the campaign sat there for months, possibly because no other advertiser purchased the bus shelter circuit it was running on.

Now, some seven years later, they keep running the same concept & copy.

Not only that: they have used them on massive billboards all along I95.

Not only THAT: other hospitals are shamelessly using the same creative gimmick.

biggER, fastER, easiER, better, soonER and so on and so forth.

An all-out ER war has broken out in SoFla.

An overt, vicious, shameless, take-no-prisoners hospital pissing contest.

Every ER in SoFla now claims to be fastER and bettER.

What started as just a hit-or-miss, unproven marketing theory executed for a backroad tactical media rollout became a full-blown ad blitz with possibly millions of dollars in media behind it.

It turns out that people do indeed judge hospitals by the ER experience.

Noblesse oblige: Mercy’s marketing department at the time was lead by Evelyn Arias and Inés Cano.

They deserve a lot of credit for starting this small advertising war in the sleepy South Florida Hospital category.

Sound strategy, still, is nothing without clever creative.

You might say that the ER type pun was just a gimmicky creative flash in the pan, a brain fart.

You might claim it is not really a BIG idea.

Sure.

But it is still my intellectual property.

Do you think I ever got a call from Mercy Hospital or any other hospital in town to send me a residuals check? To negotiate a buyout of my creative thinking? To say thank you? NevER.

I’m not blaming the marketing team that lead the project back in the day.

They moved on to other jobs with other employers.

Needless to say, I’m not planning on taking Mercy Hospital or any other hospital to court.

No way in hell I’d win a case of this nature.

They have lots of legal battles under their belts those damn hospitals.

It would be a walk in the park for their legions of bloodsucking court jesters.

They would claim that I did the campaign as the proverbial WFH (work for hire) which presupposes a relinquishment of any intellectual property claim.

Possibly true, despite the fact that I did not sign a contract of any nature.

OK ok, I give up.

Long story short, if you work in the advertising racket, take my advice: never work for hire.

Even if it is a little insignificant tactical seasonal campaign.

Nobody knows a big idea when they see it.

Little ideas can become big when and if we just let them take on a life of their own.

Intellectual property is moribund, yes, but it is not dead yet.