Clarian ads win major award-WEB ONLY

Cue the theme from “Rocky.” Indianapolis ad firm The Heavyweights and its client Clarian Health have won one of the ad industry’s biggest awards for Clarian’s “A Call to Change” campaign.

In June, The Heavyweights will receive a North American Effie Award from a trade organization called Effie Awards. The Effie Awards’ Web site calls its award – given for demonstrable effectiveness of a marketing campaign – “the pre-eminent award in the industry.”

Clarian and The Heavyweights won for their campaign encouraging women to come in for mammograms. Through TV, billboards, direct mail and lots of online ads, Clarian drove women to its Web site or to health fairs or to physicians.

The Heavyweights tracked its effectiveness in two ways. It followed the number of women who had not been Clarian patients who came in for a mammogram. Those numbers rose an average of 52 percent in the past two years.

In addition, Clarian and the Heavyweights tried to match the names and addresses of direct mail recipients with names and addresses of new patients coming for mammograms to see how many recipients responded.

“These ads didn’t say, ‘Oh, come to Clarian because we’re the best at imaging.’ Or, ‘Oh, come to Clarian, we’re the best at cancer than anybody else,'” said Heavyweights CEO John Luginbill. “It was messaging to the community of the importance of the mammogram and the high likelihood that you don’t know when you have breast cancer.”

The result, Luginbill said, benefited the Indianapolis-area community by getting more women screened and benefited Clarian’s business.

The win is unusual for an Indianapolis ad firm. The Effies typically go to large ad firms from major media markets like New York and Chicago.

In 2005, Indianapolis-based Young & Laramore won an Effie Award for a national campaign it developed for Ohio-based Stanley Steemer.

In the past two years, Clarian’s “A Call to Change” campaign also has been recognized in numerous pieces in HealthLeaders, a trade publication. Different parts of the campaign won medals at the 2008 HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards.

Also at those awards, Indianapolis-based Community Health Network won the highest medal, platinum, for its marketing of the opening of its Community Hospital North expansion.