Two years ago, Ken Chaplin, then CMO of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), received a new assignment: overseeing the marketing department of City of Hope, the California-based cancer research center that acquired CTCA in 2021. It didn’t take long for him to realize how different the two hospitals’ marketing strategies were.

• CTCA “had a model that was very dependent upon direct-to-consumer marketing,” while City of Hope wasn’t tracking “the causality of marketing on performance,” as it relied primarily on patient referrals, Chaplin said.
• “The team, the work, and the intention was all there,” he said. “It just didn’t have the [data] underpinnings to inform the output.”
• Since then, Chaplin, now the system CMO for City of Hope, has been bridging the gap as he looks to reintroduce City of Hope to national audiences and retire the CTCA brand. That rebranding has required a near-complete marketing strategy overhaul, one that is still underway, Chaplin said.

Big picture: The evolution occurring at City of Hope is emblematic of a shift happening within many health systems around the country. They’re evolving their marketing strategies to account for audiences who are increasingly seeking out health information first through a Google search instead of a visit to a practitioner. But for health systems, there are several challenges along the way, including rules on patient privacy and online targeting.

“There’s an enormous amount of investment that goes into digital,” according to Devika Mathrani, chief marketing and communications officer at NewYork-Presbyterian. “That’s something that has changed dramatically for healthcare in the last 10 years.”

Read the full story here.—KS, MA

Once a sports marketer, always a sports marketer.

In September, Sophie Bambuck joined The North Face as CMO after serving as the first CMO of Everlane for nearly a year and a half. Prior to that, she spent more than 12 years at Nike, most recently as VP of global brand marketing for Nike Sportswear.

Bambuck joined The North Face at a time when it seems to be experiencing momentum. The company saw an uptick in sales when the pandemic first hit as more people spent time outdoors, and it’s still seeing gains—in Q3, its revenue grew 7%.

Six months into her new gig, Bambuck said she’s bringing learnings from her past roles while plotting her vision for North Face as she plans her first campaign with the company this fall.

Read what she had to say here.—KH

Chin up, marketers: Things (may) not be looking so bad for ad spend in the coming months despite recent talk of a recession and the continued effects of the pandemic.

Ad spend in the US is expected to grow 2.8% this year, according to a forecast from S&P Global Ratings, a small bump from its initial prediction of 2.6%. Next year, it’s predicted to increase by 8.4%.

“Our economists forecast that a recession, while it could happen later in the year than we had originally anticipated, will also likely be milder than what we anticipated at the beginning of the year,” Naveen Sarma, senior director of US media and telecommunications for S&P, said.

Sarma noted that “historically, advertising was always a lagging indicator of economic activity. Economies went into recession or started to slow down, and then you started to see advertising start to slow a quarter or two later than the GDP numbers that we were looking at,” he said.

However, according to Sarma, because so much advertising is now sold digitally, or “right before airtime,” it has become a leading indicator of economic activity. He pointed to the fact that digital platforms like Facebook and Google saw a “slowdown in advertising spending” as early as the first half of last year when economic concerns set in.

“It’s an interesting dynamic that we hadn’t seen in any of the other economic slowdowns in the past, whether it was 2008 or 2001,” he said. “Advertising always slowed down later than the economy. In this case, we’re actually starting to see it slow down ahead of the economy.”—JS

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Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Before embarking on a brand redesign, consider the following
• How sports management and marketing students get the Super Bowl on their resumes
• A conversation with Royal Caribbean’s CMO