As published in Strategic Health Care Marketing, by Andy Semons and Donna T. Walthall

How Dana-Farber Cancer Institute used neuroscience to transform its approach to underserved populations.

Any good marketer who has been on the receiving end of a DEI backlash can tell you that both strategically and in execution, fostering inclusivity isn’t as simple as saying “we care” or including visual representation of diverse groups in communications.

DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] is truly complex. And between the current politicization of DEI and the failure to get it right, many organizations are asking themselves if it’s worth it.

Still, in health care, the benefits of a successful approach to DEI speak for themselves. For the community, it’s better care and a better patient experience. For health care organizations, it’s a happier, more loyal and productive workforce, innovation, and advocacy. And a deeper understanding of neuroscience — the science of the human brain and its impact on behavior — can help pave the way for a successful DEI approach.

Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a cancer research and treatment center with over 75 years of experience, is a prime example of how an organization overcame bias with neuroscience.

Continue reading to learn how neuroscience helped Dana-Farber understand and more effectively reach underserved communities. We’ll share the organization’s “12 Everyday Acts of Inclusion” as well as an example of how inclusivity builds trust and paves the way for change.

Why Neuroscience?

Neuroscience teaches us that our brains are built for unconscious preferences. The brain makes memory-based predictions and naturally looks for patterns in experience, prioritizing the familiar. While that can be helpful in many ways, it can also create unconscious preference, or bias, if left unchecked.

Cognitive biases may be helpful in some ways, like keeping us out of danger. But they can also impede good decision making. Think about how many times, in the course of decision making, we overvalue data that supports our own personal beliefs, avoid doing research on too many choices, make snap decisions based on past experiences. That’s cognitive bias at work. In brief, each one of us brings our own biases to the table. And if they’re not managed on an institutional level, they can get in the way of sound DEI practice.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Lessons Learned on How to Overcome Bias

Bias against the Dana-Farber brand was an obstacle to its mission to improve public health in some underserved communities. So much so, that outreach workers viewed the brand as a hinderance and would remove it from efforts to promote the early detection and prevention of cancer.

Research within the target community revealed the reasons behind the bias. The findings showed two key areas of concern:

• Negative perceptions of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute name
  • The community had negative associations with the word “cancer” (i.e., a death sentence, fate, and something to be avoided).
  • The word “institute” brought up associations of experimental research and invoked the infamous Tuskegee Institute experiments.
• Perceptions that Dana-Farber, as a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate, was elitist and not welcoming to people of color

In neuroscience terms, these biases created a “threat response” among the local community which caused people to shut down and not listen to Dana-Farber’s messaging. Importantly, neuroscience suggests a number of actionable ways that communications can work to overcome a threat response and open up a productive dialogue:

• Create a narrative that is personal, not institutional: Avoid speaking as an institution and leveraging a human voice.
• Storytelling: Telling a story eliminates the threat of being lectured or belittled. It simply allows the target to project themselves into a narrative, which often is happening to someone else, and understand the point of view of the storyteller. Our brains enjoy participating in the stories of others and are intrigued by stories.
• Keep it familiar: Stories should be told from identifiable, relatable, and empathetic people with whom the target can easily establish a rapport.
• Feed the target’s sense of being in control: Spend more time talking about the positive steps a target can take as opposed to magnifying the extent of a problem or threat. And if they’re taking positive steps to do the right thing, acknowledge it.
• Highlight benefits: End benefits such as longer life, emotional well-being, more time with family and loved ones are compelling ways to keep the conversation going.

Dana-Farber’s new community work, still in market today, established a positive and optimistic tone while leveraging influencers and other members of the community to get its message across — that cancer can be conquered, and that screening is a powerful tool available to all of us. Campaign results have reflected considerable improvements among the target in brand awareness, preference, and consideration.

Dana-Farber’s Community Screening advertising keeps it personal, highlights benefits, and feeds the target’s sense of control.

Addressing DEI: A Practical Application

Dana-Farber’s commitment to DEI grew not just from the realization that it needed to better understand a community it served; it also grew from understanding that the organization needed to change.

Historically, Dana-Farber’s patient population has been homogeneous and it has lacked diversity in its faculty and staff.

Today, Dana-Farber’s commitment to DEI extends far beyond the chief diversity officer and touches every member of the staff. It has an active program training employees in inclusive behaviors, stressing 12 key everyday acts of inclusion and reinforcing the values of Commitment, Courage, Consciousness, Curiosity, Cultural Intelligence, and Collaboration. Dana-Farber’s example is a model for comprehensive DEI initiatives in health care.

Dana-Farber’s 12 Everyday Acts of Inclusion are a cornerstone of employee training in DEI.

While each organization may have its own challenges in implementing successful DEI policy, neuroscience strongly supports the following practical tools for challenging bias within an organization:

• Keep your team diverse to keep perspective as varied as possible.
• Standardize your process to keep it inclusive and open.
• Bring the community in — do your homework and make sure views are known and heard.
• Test your assumptions before building communication.
• Lead with empathy and curiosity in everything you do.

In summary, while bias is inherent in everyone and in every organization, how we manage it, on an individual or enterprise level, is up to us. Key to this is not just embracing inclusive behaviors but understanding that how we communicate matters.

Andy Semons is Founder, Strategic Planning Partner, IPNY. With 30+ years in advertising, including building and growing Ogilvy Healthcare, Andy is dedicated to driving results for clients while leveraging the power of consumer insights and neuroscience to build brands. He is a founding partner of IPNY, a brand positioning and messaging company. Clients include Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, City of Hope Medical Center, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Regeneron, Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center, and WNET PBS THIRTEEN.

Donna Walthall is Senior Director, Marketing, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. During Donna’s 25-year tenure, she’s led the development and implementation of innovative strategies to grow Dana-Farber’s reputation and increase patient volume for Dana-Farber’s primary clinical collaborations with Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She’s also directed marketing outreach to communities of color.

As published on the Strategic Health Care Marketing site.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with IPNY, has been named a finalist in the prestigious MM+M Awards. These awards celebrate outstanding creativity and effectiveness in healthcare marketing and communications.

IPNY’s campaign, titled “We specialize in cancer. And you.” has been recognized in the Use of Hospital or Healthcare Services Marketing category. The primary objective of this campaign was to motivate patients to inquire about treatment and/or book appointments at Dana-Farber Brigham. To achieve this, the campaign aimed to create a highly differentiating and motivating brand equity that communicated the unparalleled specialization in cancer treatment, research and benefits offered by Dana-Farber Brigham.

The central insight driving this campaign was the understanding that true specialization in cancer goes beyond medical knowledge. It encompasses a profound understanding of patients, coupled with exceptional listening and caregiving skills. This insight formed the basis of the campaign’s promise: Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center specializes in two things – cancer, and you.

The omnichannel campaign featured powerful patient stories, providing firsthand accounts of how Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center’s treatment is truly in a class of its own. The campaign’s effectiveness is evident in its remarkable results: from October 2023 to January 2024, there was a 154% increase in booked appointments year over year.

Larry Dobrow of MM+M praised the campaign, stating, “It’s an honor to celebrate the marketing that helps so many people achieve better health outcomes.” The MM+M Awards, now in their 21st year, are considered the premier awards program in the medical marketing industry. Winners will be announced later this year in August/September.

This recognition underscores the commitment and expertise of Dana-Farber Brigham and IPNY in delivering impactful healthcare marketing that not only informs but inspires action.

As published in SHSMD Spectrum

Healthcare marketers are finding new ways to overcome bias in communications by using the principles of neuropsychology. Understanding that how they communicate matters, smart marketers are using these principles to unlock the once-closed minds within their own organizations and in communities of color as well as in traditionally underserved patient populations affected by negative historical biases toward (and within) the healthcare industry.

This featured discussion, “Overcoming Bias: How to Unlock a Closed Mind,” was presented at the SHSMD23 Connections annual conference by Donna Walthall, the senior director of marketing at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Sarah Bridges, PhD, the CEO and founder of Bridges Consulting and an industry expert in neuropsychology; and Andy Semons, a founder and strategic planning partner at IPNY. The speakers discussed overcoming biases and developing effective communications that resonate with audiences despite preconceived opinions.

Applying Neuropsychology in Marketing

Dr. Bridges outlined the importance of recognizing biases and how they relate to perceptions. She also described the different types of cognitive biases, including:

• Availability heuristic: When something comes to mind quickly or is more sensational, people tend to think it is accurate.
• Choice overload and decision fatigue: If people have too many choices, they do not act.
• Cognitive dissonance, or difficulty changing one’s beliefs.
• Confirmation bias and looking for information that supports our beliefs.
• Halo effect, or how positive or negative impressions affect our opinions and beliefs.
• Negativity bias.
• Salience bias, which focuses on more prominent information or the big, breaking news.
• Status quo bias: Individuals stick with what’s familiar rather than what is riskier.

Dr. Bridges defines bias as “unconscious preference,” explaining that people make predictions based on what they know and often balk at the unfamiliar and things that don’t match their beliefs.

“We must understand the beliefs of our audiences,” she says. “We filter in information that confirms what we believe and do not see the information that doesn’t. And, with brands or with products, if there’s even one negative story that gets out among 50 good ones, people remember the negative story. Negative bias is wired into our brains.”

How the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Overcame Bias

During her 20-year journey leading the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s marketing efforts, what Donna Walthall learned about overcoming bias has been eye-opening.

As a world-renowned cancer institute that strives for a balance of 50% research and 50% clinical care, research has always been a large part of Dana-Farber’s DNA. However, the local community of color held a negative perception of the Institute, leading Walthall to find out why these biases existed.

“Although we were a world-class institution with a wonderful reputation nationally and internationally, our local community wasn’t loving us, saying things like ‘People go in, but they don’t come out,’” Walthall recalls.

She found that community biases included fear and mistrust, influenced by historical events like the Tuskegee study and the public’s belief that research and, by extension, Dana-Farber were detrimental to people of color. As a result, fear was intertwined with the Dana-Farber brand.

Components of the Campaign

Overcoming the negative bias and changing the narrative was the top priority for Walthall and her team. Their initial approach was to create targeted communications that were intentional and clear in telling the Institute’s story.

This effort included:

• Ads in local media focused on the expertise in treating cancer. Messaging focused on being welcoming and accessible, using positive language such as “Cancer can be survived” and “We’re an ally in the fight against cancer.”
• Telling the stories of local community leaders and real patients that lent credibility and honesty to the Dana-Farber narrative.
• A community mammography van that prominently featured the Dana-Farber name and logo, and included images of people who lived in the community to build trust.
• Events held at the Institute that invited the community inside to experience it in a non-threatening way.

“Instead of shying away from the Dana-Farber name that had evoked such fear in the community, we put it everywhere and told our community who we were very deliberately,” Walthall explains.

Walthall also enlisted the strategic communications help of Andy Semons at IPNY for a novel approach to encouraging community-wide cancer screening, targeting patient populations stressed by the pandemic and socioeconomic disadvantages.

Putting to work the lessons learned from neuropsychology, the IPNY team knew that to change behavior, they needed to build communications that didn’t elicit a threat response from communities receiving the message.

“It’s really hard to tell somebody who mistrusts you that they should be doing something,” notes Semons, who emphasizes the importance of empathetic communication in behavior change. Instead of prescribing actions, IPNY focused on benefits like support and being in personal control of one’s health.

Dr. Bridges adds: “When we are told we can’t do something or we must do something, the instinctive reaction is to resist it.”

The 30th Annual Communicator Awards Announces IPNY’S Dana-Farber Campaign, Momentum of Discovery, A Winner

The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA) chose IPNY’s campaign for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Momentum of Discovery, as a winner in the category of Campaign-Medical & Pharmaceutical. The campaign reflects the long history of Dana-Farber making significant discoveries and innovating the way cancer is treated around the world. In fact, IPNY’s research revealed that “over the past five years, Dana-Farber research has contributed substantively to 51% of all FDA-approved cancer drugs.”

The Communicator Awards is the leading global awards program honoring creative excellence for marketing and communications professionals. Founded three decades ago, the Communicator Awards is an annual competition recognizing the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and design.

The awards are sanctioned and judged by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA), an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from acclaimed brand and media, interactive, advertising, and marketing firms including: GE Digital, Spotify, Condè Nast, Disney, Accenture Song, Superfly, Fast Company, and many others.

With over 3,000 entries received from across the US and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals. The competition celebrated its 30th anniversary this year with a pledge to honor timeless communication.

To view the winning work, visit the Winners Gallery.

See aiva.org for more information.

Awarded at a live event celebrating healthcare leaders.

Below is the nomination letter by Bruce Lee, IPNY’s Founder and Chief Creative Officer, that beautifully summarizes Andy’s skills and talents.

This past May marks the first decade that IPNY has been in business. Which is an accomplishment at a time when most startup agencies don’t make it past the first year. There are many reasons why IPNY has had such good fortune. One of the most significant is Andy Semons. 

As one of our three Agency Founders and head of Strategic Planning, Andy has been an inspiration from the moment we opened our doors. We opened them with no clients and no income and within two weeks we had both, thanks to Andy’s skill and persuasiveness. The client was The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). They needed a brand film. But having done little advertising, they had no brand to speak of. Andy suggested doing some discovery research to find out what made LLS distinctive as a cancer research organization. The interviews Andy conducted within the organization and with leading scientists gave us a wealth of insight into the extraordinary impact LLS has had on the cancer landscape. This strategic work became the rock-solid foundation of “Someday is Today”, IPNY’s pioneering first healthcare campaign. In less than one year it put LLS on the map as a leading-edge charitable organization and produced an unprecedented lift in donations. And it set the bar for the kind of kind of creative IPNY has produced ever since: Beautifully crafted work that makes scientific and medical breakthroughs easy to understand without diminishing how revolutionary they are.    

Year after year, Andy has been MVP in helping our agency grow. From groundbreaking work for LLS we went on to create brand-building communications for City of Hope Medical Center, an influential California-based cancer research hospital that desperately needed national awareness. Andy’s strategic vision inspired the much-imitated creative campaign, “The Miracle of Science with Soul”, that not only raised record awareness levels but brought IPNY even more recognition (winning the MM&M Awards Grand Prize, among many others) and significant new business wins, including Dana-Farber Cancer Center, for whom we’ve created two brand campaigns that have given this top five research hospital the recognition it has never achieved in over 70 years.

Healthcare is not the only category of work IPNY engages in, but over ten years it has become our most rewarding business sector. During the worst of the COVID crisis we were called on by the biotech innovator Regeneron to help introduce a new class of therapies, monoclonal antibodies, for high-risk COVID-19 patients. Andy’s strategic ingenuity set the course for an essential digital and multi-media public service education program that succeeded by every measure. And his leadership on the recent win of a healthcare nonprofit has, at the time of this writing, sold in a campaign that will have a major effect on pediatric cardiac health in over 80 emerging countries around the world.

IPNY is a big agency packed in a small frame. Every player must punch above his or her weight. No one epitomizes that more than Andy Semons. He is a marketer with over 40 years of experience working on influential campaigns too numerous to mention. At Ogilvy & Mather he devoted years to growing their healthcare practice, including many notable DTC and OTC campaigns. His humanity is evident from the moment you meet him. People love to talk to him. He is genuinely interested in who they are and what they know and it’s astounding what he gets them to reveal. I’ve been working as his creative partner for decades now and I can honestly say that Andy’s touch always makes our work deeper, smarter, and more honest. 

I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this nomination than Andy Semons.

IPNY and Regeneron Medical Affairs Insights & Value are recognized for their COVID campaign.

Fierce Pharma Marketing Awards has named IPNY and Regeneron Medical Affairs Insights & Value as a finalist in the PharmaTV category for their Mono WHAT? (Taking Aim Against COVID) campaign work.

The winners will be announced at the Awards Gala taking place on the evening of October 19, 2022 at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, during the annual Digital Pharma East conference. The Awards Gala will be an evening of celebration to honor the individuals, teams and companies who are leading the way in pharmaceutical marketing and advertising. See the finalist list here.

FiercePharma is a leading industry publication that delivers breaking news and analysis about drug companies, the FDA and the broader pharma industry. They cover the pharma waterfront, from late-stage drug development through the entire lifecycle—tracking regulatory approvals, payer negotiations, manufacturing, marketing, patent fights, government investigations and regulation, M&A deals and beyond. It is complete life sciences coverage from preclinical research to market and beyond.

As published in MM&M

MM&M (Medical Marketing & Media) has chosen IPNY to be included in their 2020 North American Healthcare Agency 100 issue. IPNY is profiled in the Ones To Watch section, a small select group, highlighting the agency’s expanded client roster including the addition of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, The Audacia Foundation and the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research among others.

Traditionally healthcare has received less recognition than other verticals, so it is particularly gratifying that this year IPNY is receiving industry recognition for their healthcare work. Many of the engagements have assisted clients in reaching both their branding and revenue goals and already generated significant results.

Racism is a cancer we can cure.

Fighting racism is like fighting other cancers. It takes an investment of time and resources and collaboration. Let’s be inspired by this approach to transform our society. Let’s weaken intolerance and bigotry and encourage the best in people. Here are several ways to learn and get involved: aclu, naacp, eji, nytimes