Better medicare Alliance (BMA) rate notice INTegrated and targeted campaign

WHO?

BMA supports and protects Medicare Advantage (MA) and the value-driven, quality health care it provides to seniors. Each year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has the authority to implement discretionary changes to MA plans, with final authority and approval residing with HHS and the White House. CMS also can be - and often is - influenced by Congress, the media and key stakeholder groups. The agency has a variety of policy "levers" available to either raise or decrease payment rates, and it relies on stakeholder feedback during the rate notice period to help determine the final MA rates. BMA is expected to be a strong communicator during the rate notice period to help influence policy decisions in favor of supporting MA.

WHAT?

While we've worked on BMA's branding, website and other materials, for this phase of work, our team developed an inside the beltway advertising campaign to influence the setting of annual funding rates for Medicare Advantage (MA). The campaign needed to help convince policymakers to stabilize funding for the program. After running preliminary campaigns, we found that data regarding the usage of MA plans (demographics, reduction in readmission rates, etc.) resonated with BMA’s audiences but that data alone wasn't persuasive enough to keep MA intact. We determined that research needed to be accompanied with human stories to best educate key audiences on the value of MA, reinforce BMA’s mission, and place high influence pressure on CMS/Administration

In order to tell a deeper story and to show that BMA has a broad and diverse coalition of influential groups, we drew on an insight I shared with the client that while we typically only talk about the benefits MA provides to 17 million seniors, we should utilize BMA Allies (adult children of MA beneficiaries, caregivers, nurses, doctors, etc.) to offer a fresh, authentic and influential perspective on MA. From this, we created a campaign using real people in each of these categories to provide a factual, emotional and urgent message: "To Washington it's about making a policy decision, but to me, it's about my mom/dad/patient." Children of beneficiaries who often look after their parents and help manage their health care, nurses who care for patients in the hospital and in the home and doctors and their practices who care for patients deserve predictability, security and peace of mind.

We photographed and shot real stories based on key personas in order to create digital banner ads which led to a campaign hub that featured an innovative interactive video ad unit that provided authentic viewpoints that demonstrated the vast community of MA supporters. I worked on the entire user flow from banner ad click to video experience, creating the various user paths to determine the video unit UX. 

SO WHAT?

The highly targeted paid plan's metrics proved that our message was viewed and heard and the rate notice that came out following our campaign was extremely positive and did not threaten MA as it was feared, proving our influence over the decision:

• 0.18% overall CTR with our banner ads > 0.08% benchmark CTR

• 16,165,467 impressions

• 64,593 video views

• Total YouTube impressions: 320,541

• On average, 30 seconds of the videos were seen; this is a very strong view rate compared to campaigns with videos of similar length

• Through the interactive video player, on average, 47% of viewers made at least one active choice between the three videos

• While the CMS/HHS audience is smallest (next to Media, Hill Staff and health care influencers), data showed they remained engaged throughout the campaign

Overarching campaign messaging

Story based digital banner ads

Data based digital ads