Our team was tasked with creating an exclusive livestream event in advance of the premiere of Harpo + Smithsonian Channel linear documentary, The Color of Care to build momentum and spark necessary conversation about the long-standing racial disparities within our healthcare system. We collaborated with MTV News to put together a panel of impressive experts and partnered with TikTok LIVE to broadcast a unique and powerful conversation about healthcare inequity and available solutions that can help establish a path toward saving more lives.
The panel, hosted by MTV’s Nessa, with a custom introduction by Oprah Winfrey, streamed live on April 27, 2022 and featured health policy expert and Executive Director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine Daniel E. Dawes, JD; associate professor of Social Epidemiology at Ohio State and the founder, director and principal investigator of the Social Epidemiology to Eliminate Disparities Lab (SEED) - Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson, PhD, MPH; and family medicine physician and co-founder of The Coalition to Advance Antiracism in Medicine (CAAM) Brittani James, MD.
We worked with TikTok to create custom key art to promote the livestream, including push notifications to all users to increase interest and engagement. The conversation was also posted on Facebook and impactful bites were edited after the livestream and shared on Twitter and Instagram to continue the mission of informing a wider audience of these systemic issues that deserve more attention.
The themes in the documentary touched upon systemic issues within the healthcare system as it was built decades ago. The goal of this livestream was to bring the conversation to the present day and give viewers a necessary education of how we got here but more importantly, how we can take steps to address these issues, keep this conversation top of mind and create meaningful change. Partnering with TikTok was a huge win to level up our reach and exposure to a wider audience on the platform.
Our first challenge was to create an engaging and eye-opening conversation that aimed to inform and inspire viewers to look harder at healthcare inequity and provide takeaways for anyone to start to make change within their own communities. Opening the minds of anyone watching live on TikTok to the existing systems that need fundamental change made this project unique and was a key proponent of this discussion.
Another challenge was to keep our subjects, staff and crew healthy and safe. Solutions included working remotely as a team to cast, shoot, script and then undergo robust testing to produce a livestream in studio all while keeping the panelists and crew safe to meet our deadlines and goals for this project.
Our goal was to create a companion livestream event to help generate buzz and engagement in advance of the premiere of The Color of Care documentary on Smithsonian Channel. We focused on activating a younger, socially engaged demographic on social media with an impactful conversation featuring medical experts that discussed the overall themes in the documentary- healthcare inequity, systemic issues and tangible steps and solutions to start to address these disparities and create change.
The Color of Care LIVE chat on TIkTok earned 175.1K views including 164.4K unique viewers. The peak number of viewers watching at once was 8.1K. This was the most-viewed TIkTok of 2022 for Smithsonian Channel, more than quadrupling our previous livestream averages. Viewer engagement and commentary was active throughout the duration of the live conversation, with positive feedback indicating that this was a necessary and overdue conversation with the power to bring about change.
