Cancer Treatment Centers of America® (CTCA) is a national, comprehensive cancer care network with five hospitals around the country. Founded on a personalized, patient-centered approach to cancer care, CTCA is dedicated to tailoring a combination of cancer treatments to each patient's needs. Inherent in CTCA's integrative approach is a commitment to personalized medicine, tapping breakthroughs in genomic testing, precision cancer treatment, and other scientific advances to offer patients numerous treatment options.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many cancer patients to consider postponing lifesaving treatment to avoid getting sick and preserve medical resources for COVID patients. CTCA was determined to keep caring for patients and needed to figure out how best to communicate that to potential patients via advertising.

During the pandemic, fewer people were driving, so radio listenership was decreasing and more consumers were streaming video at home. CTCA needed a new way to reach those audiences and decided to pivot its marketing to two addressable channels, over the top (OTT) and connected television (CTV) because of the increase in consumption and the ability to produce media exposure logs.

The team leveraged a cancer patient look-alike model from Crossix to create a proposed HIPAA-compliant audience to target. Media exposure data was overlapped with de-identified first-party conversion data to calculate the customer acquisition cost (CAC). This data was then ingested into Merkury (de-identification tool), resulting in raw exposure data with simple unique IDs. The same was done with CTCA's first-party conversion data, resulting in another list of unique IDs of de-identified conversions. The last stage of the analysis overlapped the exposure ID data set with the conversion data set to understand how many conversions were driven by this new channel for each DMA.