Royal baby spawns campaign

The arrival of British royal heir George Alexander Louis on July 22 left the marketing staff at Sarasota Memorial Hospital with baby on the brain.

So they did what comes natural: They created a quick campaign to plug SMH's obstetrics and maternity unit, which delivers 3,000 babies a year. In this case it was a message on a new digital sign on in front of the hospital on U.S. 41. The sign, with a crown at the bottom, stated “We Treat All Babies Like Royalty.”

“It was primitive, but it was enough to get the message across,” Peter Taylor, marketing and business development executive director for SMH, tells Coffee Talk. “There has been so much hype about the royal baby. We wanted to capitalize on it.”

The effort worked, too, because the hospital, says Taylor, received a good amount of positive feedback, mostly over social media. Several people shared memories of their babies' birth, royal or otherwise. The sign, which normally changes every day, even remained in royal baby mode for four days.

Taylor says the SMH marketing team regularly seeks out nontraditional ways to reach a mass audience. Last summer, for example, the hospital paid for a plane to fly over local beaches with the tagline Burns! Bites! Bugs! It was a promo for its urgent care centers, and a phone number and the urgent care center hours followed on the tag.

“We do some unusual stuff that's been successful,” says Taylor. “It's a little out of context, but it gets people talking.”