Waiting for the next marketing bus

Next week in San Francisco is the annual SHSMD conference. SHSMD stands for the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development. I go every year. It is one of my favorite conferences.

There will be many ideas shared there. In preparation for the conference, I've been reading up on service line marketing.

One thing I was hoping to chat to other conference attendees about was www.thewarriormovie.com

On August 27th I wrote about seeing a HealthEast URL placement on the side of a city bus as I was on my way to the Minnesota State Fair. I was intrigued so I went to www.thewarriormovie.com, but I only got to see the preview.

Today, I went back to the site again and found that not one, but three patient testimonial films will be released in October 2008 (so I will have to wait).

1. www.thewarriormovie.com - Heart attack survivor
2. www.couragegirlmovie.com - Brain aneurysm survivor
3. www.ceilsstory.com - Cancer survivor (promotes CyberKnife)

Three profitable service lines and technology will be addressed through the form of patient testimonial video. Some of the written content is also available at those three sites and I imagine that it will be economically recycled for other media outlets such as newsletters, press releases, Web site, e-mail newsletters, podcasts, radio programs, etc.

I wonder how many hits the bus URL's have received?? I wonder if they used unique URL's to track hit generation? For example, the bus could have www.thewarriormovie.com,a postcard could have www.thewarriorflick.com, and a newsletter article could have www.thewarriormovie.com/newsletter. Then, Web traffic drivers could be tracked like a horse race and they could measure which one pulled in the most Web hits. This way, if they roll out another series like this next year they'll know which tactics drive the most traffic.

I haven't seen a bus with an update about the movie yet. I wonder what other placement tactics they are using? I wonder if I will see more signage, or get a postcard?? I did sign up to receive an e-mail notification for the release of each movie in October and I'll report more on this later in the year. . .