Doctor’s Day 2023
The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) is a member-based organization that represents and advocates for the political, clinical and economic interests of Ontario physicians. This includes over 40,000 practicing physicians, residents, and medical students.
Industry
— Healthcare
— Associations
Branding to
— Improve corporate reputation
— Influence
Services
— Advertising & promotion
— Website design & development
— Corporate communications
— Digital marketing & content
The Situation
Every year the OMA celebrates the contribution doctors make in healthcare and for the public. The challenge for the organization each May 1st – Doctor’s Day is to find new innovative creative ways each year that will engage the public, the media and government to show their appreciation of Ontario’s doctors. They needed an idea that would break the public’s inertia and encourage them to participate in the day, while at the same time motivating the media to cover Doctors’ day in the news and in other channels. Additionally, the OMA uses this celebration as a way to build their public supporter database for future advocacy work, so the campaign had to find a way to convince the public to provide their email and opt-in for future communications.
Human Catalyst
Flags are powerful symbols of pride, and recognition that can motivate behaviours while representing beliefs, nationalities, allegiances, values and accomplishments.
The Solution
Yield created a campaign rallying cry of “Raise a Flag of Thanks for Ontarios’ Doctors” for all they do. To build emotion and momentum for the idea we designed a custom “thank you” flag and asked city halls and mayors across the province to raise these flags on May 1st, Doctors’ Day. The flag raising ceremonies would then create buzz because high-profile political figures would be presiding over the ceremonies thus bringing media out to cover the events. Additionally, we created a virtual way for the public to raise a flag of thanks on the doctorsday.ca web site where users could pick from a series of thank you flags and email it to Ontarios’ Doctors allowing us to capture their email address for our supporter database. We also created a dramatic pre-videotaped flag raising video so we could invite users to sign up for a virtual flag raising that would be posted to the site as a video on May 1st further allowing us to capture their email. Doctors’ Day had full integration with social media channels whereby users could post virtual thank you flags to the Facebook, Instagram, twitter along with digital billboards in 55 markets at 29 locations across the province.
The Yield
The campaign secured 55 digital billboards on short notice across the province showcasing the flag, generating over 2,000,000 impressions. Digital ads drove 17,320 unique people to the Doctor’s Day website, whereby 6,500 flags were sent to Ontario’s Doctors. More than 1,600 people provided their personal information for the database and received a video of the flag raising ceremony in their area. 19 jurisdictions conducted flag-raising ceremonies, many of which involved local dignitaries including mayors gaining media coverage in more than 14 media properties including online, radio and TV coverage.