Marketing an emergency room is a strange challenge. You can’t predict when someone will need you, and you can’t manufacture urgency. What you can do is make sure that when the moment comes, people already know your name and trust it.

ER Extra was Health Management Associates’ branded emergency room strategy, designed to standardize ER marketing across the system and distribute creative costs across 71 hospitals rather than developing campaigns independently for each market. The logic was straightforward: one powerful brand, deployed consistently, is more effective and dramatically more efficient than a variety of local efforts saying roughly the same thing.

I led the creative program in partnership with our agency partners, overseeing campaigns that ran across print, outdoor, digital, and broadcast in markets across the system. The creative leaned into smart, slightly unexpected healthcare messaging: typographically playful door hangers that made people stop and read, billboards that reframed common symptoms as potential emergencies, and a brand voice that was direct without being alarming.

A partnership with NASCAR driver Mark Martin, brokered by our agency partners, extended the brand’s reach into a demographic that overlapped strongly with ER utilization patterns, bringing the ER Extra name into a context where most healthcare brands never venture.

Portions of this work were with our agency partners, Beber Silverstein Group (Miami, FL) and AcrobatAnt (Tulsa, OK).