Every now and then, a technology comes forth that offers a quantum leap forward in the progression of an industry or craft. With surgery, that’s come with the introduction of robotics.
However, the medical device market is highly regulated and legally restrictive, intimidating most market players from telling stories of their brands or products. INTUITIVE was actively trying to invest in brand storytelling, but past marketing efforts were product-focused, and did not resonate with the market.
INTUITIVE turned to Freethink to help humanize what can be a complex and obscure topic, and convey how INTUITIVE thought leadership and competitive differentiation improves the surgeon experience and better outcomes for patients.
Freethink produced a mini-documentary that brought to life the story of INTUITIVE's employee whose experience as a patient for a surgical technology he helped create, inspired him to advance surgical innovation to the next level. By showcasing the personal testimony of a patient, we were able to circumvent difficult legal and medial restrictions, and because this patient was also an enterprising employee, we were able to spotlight thought leadership and build positive associations for the brand. The story was also a natural vehicle to showcase how INTUITIVE is on the forefront of innovation and development in robotic surgery, explaining the technical differentiation and surgeon/patient-centric design of INTUITIVE products in a contextual way. Custom animation and graphics helped breakdown the technological parts and processes to demystify robotic surgery to patients and assure surgeons' high standards of perforamnce.
We paired the video with a robust distribution plan, with multiple and native cutdowns across Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and LinkedIn. We targeted viewers who were most likely to engage, including the Freethink audience of techno-optmists, viewers of similar thematic content, etc.
This video was a runway hit, garnering over one million topline views and 19% of those views were completed- that means that 214,000 viewers engaged with the INTUITIVE brand story for an uninterrupted 5:30 minutes. This video not only performed well on our traditional social media channels (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram) but also notably exceeded expectations on Linkedin, where it was shared 63x more than our average. This indicates that this was a useful tool for recruitment purposes, an additional benefit that was not included in our original objective. The video delivered nearly 4,000 social engagements, with many viewers sharing their own positive experience with the da Vinci surgery or how inspiring they were about the future of robotic surgery.
