AdvaMed Publicity Campaign Promotes Value of Medical Technology

Industry association AdvaMed (Washington, DC) is setting out to raise the profile of the medical technology industry. On June 22, the group will formally kick off a $1 million education and advertising campaign designed to convey the value of medical technology to both policy makers and the general public in Washington, DC.

The campaign will include print advertisements in Capitol Hill publications and throughout the Metro system in Washington, DC. Radio ads will run on the Beltway area’s National Public Radio stations. In addition, AdvaMed has launched a new Web site, www.progressyoucansee.org, which features detailed personal profiles of patients whose lives have been changed by medical technology, industry facts and figures, and other interactive tools.

The campaign focuses on a wide variety of medical device sectors. “From the very beginning, we agreed that this campaign was not to be about one particular technology or one particular sector,” says Mark Brager, c ommunications director at AdvaMed. “It’s designed to raise the profile of the industry as a whole.”

A campaign launch event will be held on Capitol Hill on June 22. AdvaMed member companies, members of Congress, and patients being featured in the campaign will be in attendance. Patients include national and government celebrities, such as U.S. Olympian Bonnie Blair and former White House deputy chief of staff Mike Deaver.

AdvaMed’s McGarry: Raising industry’s profile.

“This campaign is the first of its kind in the medical device industry,” says Michael J. McGarry, executive vice president for public affairs at AdvaMed. “If this targeted campaign inside the Beltway is successful, we could look at broadening it out nationally.”

Although the brunt of the current campaign targets Washington, DC, AdvaMed hopes to achieve a broader reach by having the campaign’s featured patients also talk to local press within their hometowns to discuss the three cornerstones of the AdvaMed campaign: medical technology’s value, dependability, and innovation.

The impetus behind the campaign arose from recent public opinion research conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of AdvaMed. “The good news is that the research found that policy makers, the public, and physicians have a very high regard for medical technology,” McGarry says. “But we also found that there is a lot of room to educate people as to what medical technology truly is.

“There is a broad recognition among our member companies that there is an opportunity for us as an industry to get out there and define ourselves rather than allowing others to define us,” he adds.

According to McGarry, the AdvaMed campaign is not focused on influencing policy makers on any one piece of legislation. Rather, the group hopes that raising the value of medical technology in the minds of legislators will pay off whenever Congress is asked to consider an initiative affecting the industry.

Toward the end of the year, AdvaMed plans to reevaluate the populations surveyed in the Harris Interactive poll to gauge the impact the campaign has had on public awareness of medical technology in Washington, DC, and surrounding areas.

© 2006 Canon Communications LLC

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