Challenge

Cancer Treatment Centers of America® (CTCA) is a national, comprehensive cancer care network with three hospitals around the country. It’s founded on the idea of personalized cancer care, where every patient gets a unique treatment plan tailored to them. CTCA seeks to continuously integrate new scientific advances to ensure patients have more options for a personal treatment plan. Their oncologists, nurses, and other clinicians offer a level of expertise that comes from working with cancer patients every day. CTCA is a part of City of Hope, a comprehensive cancer center designated by the National Cancer Institute and a founding member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

The COVID-19 pandemic created immense concern with travel safety. For cancer patients, this meant looking more regionally than nationally for treatment options. Historically, CTCA invested heavily in national TV because the channel’s broad reach effectively drove patients to hospitals. However, with the new realities of the pandemic, they needed to adapt to reach patients with lifesaving messaging. By combining previous learnings around audience, impression frequency, and geo targeting, CTCA successfully pivoted into addressable TV in an effective, HIPAA-compliant way.

Approach

CTCA activated a regional addressable TV (ATV) campaign to reach cable households in a way that could be personalized at scale, using learnings from other channels to drive success across three main campaign areas:

• Audience
• Impression Frequency
• Geography/Locations

CTCA targeted a proven third-party audience that outperformed demographic audiences to increase the likelihood for engagement with the brand. They also used frequency cap insights from tests on connected TV, which translated well to ATV given the similar consumer experience and ad length options. These approaches helped CTCA minimize campaign inefficiency while optimizing performance during the move from national cable buys to addressable TV. The team also activated across different providers to identify the best reach in the most important DMAs, while managing the different CPMs across each platform.

CTCA used its own first-party data to analyze how COVID-19 impacted their business metrics and patient travel patterns. The data suggested that a regional approach would be more efficient than targeting all 210 designated market areas (DMAs). Therefore, marketing focused on approximately 160 DMAs where patients could potentially travel to a hospital, within reason.

By combining these components, CTCA launched an ATV campaign across 160 DMAs with proven audience and impression delivery strategies, measuring the campaign using Merkle’s advanced TV closed-loop reporting and attribution solution as well as Merkury’s identity solution via a clean room.