When Ramon Soto, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, joined Northwell Health 12 years ago, the health company was grappling with standing out in a crowded market where most hospital advertising looked and sounded the same.
As Soto notes, Northwell is “the largest health system in the Metro New York market,” with about 108,000 employees, more than 6 million patients, roughly 7,000 doctors and 22,000 nurses in a nonprofit system that spans the region.Competing in one of the most competitive healthcare markets in the country, Soto’s brief was to develop marketing tactics to persuade New Yorkers to choose Northwell.
He did not want to do it with the usual playbook.
“I’m not a big fan of hospital marketing. I’m not sure many Americans are,” Soto said. “There tends to be a lot of hope through fear, or ‘I’m the number one in this and that category of care,’ a lot of chest thumping, a lot of doctors in white coats. We really try to tap into what care means to an individual. What does health really mean to an individual? What’s their journey of care, and drive both a conversation about the head, the rational side of the equation, and the heart.”
That thinking led to Raise Health, a platform designed to reposition healthcare as an ongoing partnership. It also opened the door to purpose-driven campaigns on gun violence, women’s health and mental health; a full-fledged content studio producing long-form projects for Netflix, HBO and other platforms; and an AI-first digital strategy that reimagines what a health system website should do for patients.
Chief Marketer: What is Raise Health, and how does it change the way you market a health system compared to traditional hospital advertising?
Ramon Soto: Raise Health is the value proposition work that came out of that original assignment 12 years ago, and it’s redefining what healthcare means with an individual. Healthcare tends to talk about episodes of care, this thing that happens to you at one moment in time, and it’s rarely that. You consume care over time.
We wanted to be truly consumer-oriented and redefine how we talked about care in our partnership with individuals. It really is a platform for us to take an oath and a promise to improve the health of the communities we serve. It also serves as a platform to challenge consumers to take command of their own health and to raise their own health.
CM: You’ve taken on gun violence, women’s health and the mental health crisis. How do you decide what to take on and build campaigns that are both sensitive and effective?
RS: We choose to express Raise Health as our challenge to smash the status quo, knowing that healthcare and healthcare delivery nationally are not where they need to be, and we express it through purpose-driven marketing.
We were the first health system back in 2023 to do a campaign on gun violence prevention. Guns in 2020 became the leading cause of death of children in this country, and healthcare has brand permission to step into that lane because of that fact. We didn’t do it necessarily for brand love. We did it really as a service to the communities that we serve, but we got a tremendous amount of credit on the brand side.
It’s not just gun violence; it’s women’s health, and women are treated differently when they show up for their healthcare delivery. There’s a mental health crisis that’s going on in the country. We lose $200 million a year in providing behavioral health services. We do it because it’s part of what the communities that we serve need.
Respect is incredibly important. Patient privacy is super important. We have a very strict protocol for obtaining individual consent before we film anything, and we review all content with the individuals before it airs. Sometimes people have buyer’s remorse. You have to be very respectful of the patient–doctor interaction. Patient safety is paramount.
CM: Northwell is one of the first health systems to establish a formal in-house content studio. What was the strategic rationale for Northwell Studios, and how does it change the way you tell your brand story?
RS: We were the first to launch it. Time magazine recognized us as one of the 100 most innovative companies in the U.S. for taking a novel approach to capturing this content and distributing it into the marketplace.
We started analyzing different industries. I looked at retail. I looked at financial services. We looked at entertainment, specifically Disney’s model and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At the time, they had done more than 20 films. They were all interrelated in storytelling. You have your heroes, and you have your villains. The analogies to healthcare were really quite profound, and they took this long-term view on the storytelling.
Our first project was a nine-episode docudrama on Netflix called Lenox Hill. That project had 40 million hours of viewership, where we invited consumers behind the glass to see all the really special things that happen in our health system. One of our films was shortlisted for an Academy Award. We focus on really thoughtful content, really high-quality storytelling.
CM: You’ve said AI will send shockwaves through advertising. Where are you experimenting first, and what does that mean for content and media buying?
RS: On the content creation side, there are tools to build films. Historically, if I run a 30-second ad, it costs me about half a million bucks. Now I can do a 30-second ad, and the hard costs are virtually zero, but it’s 100 percent AI. So is the experience the right experience? Is the storytelling the right storytelling? It’s probably not as good, but is 80 percent as good? In some use cases, yes, and in other use cases, no. That will send shockwaves throughout the traditional advertising industry.
In addition, using AI to match that content with individual consumers will change media buying pretty dramatically, and media buying margins will get squeezed. That front-end piece of marketing, both the content creation and the content distribution, AI is going to change everything.
CM: You’re also rebuilding Northwell’s digital experience as AI first. For a patient arriving at your site with a problem, what will actually feel different?
RS: When somebody comes to my website, it can’t be the traditional website. We’re leaning in; we’re partnering with Google to reimagine our digital assets and rebuild our website to be AI-first.
If you come to my website, you don’t come there to peruse. You’re going there because you have an injury or an illness, and when you have one, you are entering a mystery and trying to demystify it. How can I step forward and use AI to shorten that knowledge cycle and help you demystify? Instead of hunting and pecking for information, I’m very actively providing you with the answers. And once I provide you with the answers, how do I provide you with the solutions — the physicians who can actually get you better?
It’s a wonderful opportunity to reimagine the status quo and raise health of the individuals who come to us with care.
