El Camino Health Brand Campaign: Accept Nothing Less
The Challenge
Healthcare advertising is crowded with sameness. Smiling doctors. Fake people. Generic promises about care.
El Camino Health needed to stand out in a category where everything looks and sounds interchangeable. At the same time, they needed to build awareness in a highly competitive South Bay market and communicate the quality of care they actually deliver.
Patients didn’t know how good El Camino Health really was.
The Strategy
We didn’t try to soften the message. Instead the campaign aimed to set a higher bar:
Accept Nothing Less.
The idea reframed healthcare choice as a standard, not a preference. It positioned El Camino Health as the level of care people should expect everywhere even if they don’t always get it.
Creative Platform
“Accept Nothing Less.”
The platform was direct, confident, and unapologetic. It challenged patients to expect more from their healthcare providers and positioned El Camino Health as the place that delivers on that expectation.
The tone broke from category norms. No clichés. No softness. Just a clear statement of quality and accountability.
Execution
Integrated Video Campaign
The campaign launched across TV, streaming, and digital video, bringing the message into homes throughout the South Bay. The work emphasized clarity and confidence, reinforcing the idea that patients deserve better and should demand it.
Social and Digital
Social and digital placements extended the message, making the campaign visible across the community. The work showed up where people live and work, reinforcing El Camino Health as a local standard for care.
Streaming Audio
The campaign ran across streaming audio and radio ensuring the message was consistent and unavoidable. Every touchpoint reinforced the same idea: when it comes to healthcare, you shouldn’t settle. Accept nothing less than El Camino Health.
Results
The campaign significantly increased awareness across the South Bay and helped reposition El Camino Health as a leader in quality care. We more than doubled brand before the campaign finished running.
More importantly, it changed how the brand was perceived. Instead of blending into the category, El Camino Health stood apart as a provider setting expectations, not just meeting them.
The work made quality visible.
Why It Worked
El Camino Health didn’t promise better care, it made people demand it.
Most healthcare advertising reassures. This campaign challenged. By asking people to expect more, it gave them a new lens to evaluate care. That shift made the message more memorable and more actionable.
About Division of Labor
Division of Labor is a San Francisco advertising agency specializing in brand and launch campaigns that break category conventions. We help organizations stand out by saying something sharper, clearer, and more human than everyone else around them. El Camino Health partnered with Division of Labor to turn quality care into a standard people expect — not just a message they hear.
Campaign Overview
El Camino Health partnered with Division of Labor to launch the “Accept Nothing Less” brand campaign, positioning the organization as a standard for high-quality care. Through video, out-of-home, digital, and radio, the campaign increased awareness and challenged patients to expect more from their healthcare providers.
WANNA KNOW MORE?
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El Camino Health sits in the shadow of Stanford Medical Center, UCSF and Kaiser in the heart of Silicon Valley. Their two hospitals and network of over 500 doctors offer innovative care and cutting-edge procedures in cancer, cardiovascular, pulmonary care, women’s health and more. But unlike their competitors, El Camino Health serves the community with grace and compassion treating everyone like a person, not a patient.
Awareness of El Camino Health was at only 3% even though they had been serving the Silicon Valley community for decades. Our job was to build awareness, drive website traffic and get El Camino Health on the consideration radar for people in Silicon Valley.
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Results and Respect. Every patient deserves both. That was our strategy.
It’s no surprise that people think the American healthcare system is broken. Too often patients have to choose between being treated properly and being treated by the best. And that does not have to be the case.
Division of Labor is the ad agency for startups. We work with a ton of startup founders and understand Silicon Valley culture. And the overwhelming truth is that startups that merely offer a product benefit but don’t make an emotional connection with their customers, will not succeed. Product benefits are too easy to imitate, especially in technology.
The same is true in healthcare. Technology and innovation are everywhere. Talented doctors are everywhere. But healthcare is also about how people are treated, mentally and emotionally. Are they treated with respect? Do the doctors understand their ethnicity and the issues associated? Are people treated with compassion in the moments that matter most?
At El Camino Health, results are all that matter, but in that moment, how you’re treated means everything.
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This was a full, multi-media campaign with commercials running on broadcast, cable and streaming TV. We did digital video, digital banners, social media, radio, podcasts, out-of-home, print in local newspapers, email, direct mail, I think we even had one of those guys spinning a sign on the corner. (We did not.)
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> The advertising campaign doubled unaided brand awareness moving from 3% to 6% before the campaign had even finished running.
> Digital campaign performance exceeded all benchmarks with over 14 million impressions, 20,000 clicks and a .14% click-through rate in the first quarter alone.