Cover Story : Getting the Message

Texting program answers BlueCross BlueShield of Kansas City's call for younger leads

Heard It On the Radio
Blue KC had a big blue marble full of possibilities. But when it came time to figure out how to get the word out about the text messaging program, Rowe says the insurer went with its gut.

Why weren't there scads of studies? How about repeated testing? Focus groups?

"We could've spent, easily, $100,000 on research, trying to figure out if this would work," Meers says. "And it would've taken us six months. And, instead, we spent a fraction of that, put it into the market, and we got lucky."

Meers and Rowe went with the observation they'd made about the concert—that the radio station that told them about the opportunity to sponsor the Red, White and Boom concert was doing more than hosting nine bands for the June 2008 event, it worked as a voice the audience listened to in addition to the headliner, Lifehouse.

"It was a hunch," Rowe says. "And we said, 'We're going to take this much money. We can afford to take this much money and find out if our hunch is right.' And that was the research."

So Blue KC put its brand in the hands of radio deejays, trusting that the host of a morning drive at a hip hop station would know how to talk to her audience in a way that completely diverged from how the host of an AM sports talk show related to his fans. (Blue KC also receives "airchecks," or audio recordings of what the deejays said, and can tell them to dial it back if it goes too far.)

"For Blue Cross to tell a 25-year-old guy that [he] should have health insurance is totally different than if the deejay who [he] listens to everyday says, 'Hey, you know what? You need to have health insurance,'" Rowe says. "'It's really easy to do. Matter of fact, you can do it right on your phone.' It's a totally different thing.

" ... We didn't give them scripts," he continues. "We sat down with them and said, 'Here's the three things we need to overcome with this market.' They don't think they need [health insurance]. And so we need to let them know that they need it. We need to talk to them about that in a way they can relate to. They don't relate to heart disease or cancer. But a 25-year-old guy can relate to blowing out his knee playing basketball or wrecking a Jet Ski and tearing up his shoulder or wiping out on a snowboard or something like that.

"Or, if you're a deejay and you have a personal incident you're willing to talk about—why you're glad you have insurance—that's even better for us," Rowe says. "So we need to get a need that resonates with them. Then we need to let them know that 'It's less than you think.' We don't need to quote rates or do anything like that."

But, full disclosure, Meers says that "at least 70 percent" of the reason for employing the deejays as brand evangelists was the cost. It was inexpensive, compared to Blue KC's other options.

"We knew that if we started producing radio spots, we'd be spending tens of thousands of dollars a quarter producing different radio spots," Meers says. "And once we tried (the deejay route) and we realized how effective it was and how versatile it was, it worked. But the smart part of it was being able to have the back end metrics in place so we could recognize what was actually happening, and then make decisions based on what we saw on the front end."

Using Web analytics, Blue KC knows that 60 percent of the mobile users who opt-in for the text messages have smartphones that enable them to access the mobile site. Programs running in two other BlueCross markets, using Blue KC's model, are seeing smartphone use among their opt-ins running between 45 percent and 60 percent, Meers says. (A couple more BlueCross plans were about to adopt the business practice as of presstime, as well as two unrelated health care entities.)

From Deejay to Veejay
"I was strongarmed into doing TV," Rowe says. "This is my favorite story of the whole campaign. ... We didn't have a lot of success with TV, historically. And we had not been on direct TV for probably six years before this. But there was a sales rep at a TV station here in town who kept hearing this on the radio. And she would call me and say, 'Oh, Ron. You should do these on my TV station. We're all about text messaging.' And I would delete her message in my voice mail.

" ... I said 'no' a thousand times. I wasn't returning calls," he continues. "And so, finally, one day, I get an e-mail from her. ... And so, I decided, 'I'm going to take the opportunity to educate her and let her know why we're not going to do TV.' ... And she fires back a proposal ... I mean, TV's never been that cheap. ... So we said, 'OK. We'll give you a shot.' ... And so we do it, and wow, bam! TV takes off. ... In some cases, that TV station did better than a lot of the radio stations. And so we kept going on her TV station. We ended up expanding to other TV stations."

So starting in March 2009, deejays became veejays—talking about Blue KC in television commercials. The personalities directed insurance prospects to send text messages again in new television spots in July 2009, January 2010 and March 2010.

The commercials also leveraged the relationship the deejays had with their listeners, while the radio stations' logos got air time. Blue KC then negotiated better radio rates.

"We want to always pilot it and test it with radio," Meers says. "But once we get results, we're easily moved to television, because this audience multitasks. They're on their phone[s], they're on their laptop[s] and they're watching television, all at the same time."

There's another reason Blue KC's not forgetting the roots of the texting program's success.

"TV is not getting us the results that radio is today, a year later," Rowe says. "It was real high there for a while, but now we're shifting our focus back to radio. And I have to believe ... it's because of that endorsement, if you will, from the deejay, or the rapport, [which is] the whole reason we used the deejays from the beginning."

A Changing Tune
For health care marketers, there's an elephant in the room that their messages will have to address.

"The way we're going to have to do business is going to change in 2014," he says. "I think being willing to communicate with that market, that submarket, the 19- to 39-[year-olds] via text messaging, I don't think that's going to go away. We might be saying something different or doing something different ... But if we still want to engage them and we want to have an opportunity to talk to them and tell them our story or ask them to buy our products or take a closer look at our products, the more we're willing to use the technology that they want, the better off we are, regardless of what reform does in terms of who we've got to take and what price we've got to sell it at."

Those sentiments echo thoughts Blue KC's target market has heard before and may hear again this month, if Good Charlotte sings the song "Change" when the band takes the stage at Sandstone: "I hope my words will get through."

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