Northwell Studios: Inside the Revolution in Healthcare Storytelling
Ramon Soto, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Northwell Health reveals a powerful lesson in the innovative partnership model that helps them put purpose before profit. By offering filmmakers unprecedented access to their hospitals and healthcare teams, Northwell has reshaped their approach to branded content, while fostering deeper audience connections with their customers. It’s a lesson in how other brands can achieve social good and business success through collaboration in creative storytelling.
TRANSCRIPT
Ramon Soto: "We give the platform over to the storytellers… The showrunners are responsible for the distribution of the content. In terms of economic benefit, the studios and the showrunners are the ones that gain; we gain on the brand side."
Jesse Roesler: Greetings and welcome to “Content That Moves,” the podcast from Credo Nonfiction and BrandStorytelling that pulls back the curtain to reveal how the very best in brand films and episodic content is being funded, created, distributed, and measured.
I am your host, Jesse Roesler, the founder of Credo Nonfiction, where we partner with brands to find and tell stories that reveal brand purpose and deepen brand meaning through short and feature-length documentaries or episodic series. Visit CredoNonFiction.com to learn how we can help you create real moving stories for your brand.
This podcast is co-produced by BrandStorytelling, bringing you the latest news, trends, and insights in branded content with top-of-industry events and in-depth industry coverage online. BrandStorytelling encourages a higher level of collaboration among advertisers, agencies, media partners, and creators in pursuit of a richer media environment. For more of the latest in the world of branded content or to explore event offerings, visit BrandStorytelling.tv today.
In this episode, we are thrilled to welcome Ramon Soto, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Northwell Health. With a decade at the helm of Northwell's brand strategy, Ramon has spearheaded their innovative approach to marketing and communications, positioning Northwell as not just a leader in healthcare but a trailblazer at the intersection of health and storytelling.
In this discussion, we dive into the partnerships that power Northwell’s slate of award-winning documentaries like the Netflix series Emergency NYC and the Academy Award-shortlisted COVID-19 documentary The First Wave. Ramon shares insights for other brands into how these docuseries have reshaped brand perception and generated real-world benefits for Northwell Health.
Jesse Roesler: Ramon, I am excited to have you here, not just for the sweeping scope and incredible reach of the films that have been made possible by your team, but also because, in 35 episodes of this podcast, you are our first healthcare representative. I am excited about that because it is an exciting first for us, but also, I think it might speak to a little bit of the rarity of what you are doing and the boldness of your model. So I am excited to dig into that. Just to set the stage a little bit for folks, I know Northwell has participated in, I think, five documentaries and one national TV special, six Emmy Awards, an Academy Award shortlist selection, and 49 million hours watched. Is that…
Ramon Soto: The 49 million is probably a little short. That was the cumulative impact of one of our docuseries.
Jesse Roesler: Oh, it was just one. Wow.
Ramon Soto: Yeah, that was “Emergency NYC,” which was probably our biggest commercial success. It launched in March of 2023. It hit number five for all streaming platforms in the U.S. and solidified in my mind the power of storytelling and engaging with consumers a little bit differently. We dove into some really interesting topics in that show. I am sure we will talk about it. Gun violence was one of them. The first episode was kind of in-your-face and grabbed you. But overall, we are in the billions of impressions. The reach of our efforts has been global in nature and really transformative for our organization.
Jesse Roesler: That is incredible. I think it makes sense for us to talk a little bit about how your model might be different than a lot of the brands we talk to, which are funding content and trying to figure out how to distribute it. It is a little bit different here in that you were approached and essentially gave access. Do you want to set up how those relationships work?
Ramon Soto: Yeah, sure. This is one of those things where well-laid plans collided with opportunity. On the well-laid plan side, Northwell is a fairly new brand. We are approaching eight years old. I have been at Northwell for 10 years. I was brought on to rebrand the organization because our old brand had outstripped its utility.
We are the largest healthcare provider in the New York market. We see over six million New Yorkers. We have 85,000 employees. We have 21 hospitals. We have about 1,000 different facilities that consumers can come to for care. But we are only 30 years old, and we compete with some of the most storied brands in healthcare. One in particular is New York Presbyterian, which I tip my hat to. They are both really strong marketers and a great institution; they were born in 1751. Their hospital charter was signed by King George. They are affiliated with two Ivys. You know, it is a hyper-competitive market. How do you compete in that marketplace?
So we realized that the playbook did not exist, and we were going to rewrite it. We very purposefully analyzed consumers, took an outside-in approach, and tried to understand how they view healthcare. How do consumers take their journey? What do they think about a relationship with the health system? Who even wants to have a relationship with the health system unless they really need it? What was the world of opportunity? We had pivoted and studied different industries and how they engage with consumers. We had studied retail, digital retail, financial services, and entertainment.
Jesse Roesler: I am curious when you were first approached—kind of a two-part question—what made you say yes to that, and how did you go about getting approvals? I know that can be really tricky.
Ramon Soto: Yeah. It is funny that you mentioned this. Health fuels your life, your love, your passions, your careers. COVID was a stark reminder of what happens when you do not have it, and the fragility of life. There was this really interesting medium that, quite frankly, was exciting because it was exotic and novel.
And I knew that we would have to rewrite our playbook and venture down the road never traveled. We were in full experimentation, test-and-learn mode. I did not know that this would be anything, honestly. But we had a number of tests in the market. Some were failures, and we learned a lot from them. We moved on. This one happened to have a degree of success. It was the power of the human interest behind it. Particularly, people like doctors and nurses—think about your own journey. Most individuals, when they have a health event, enter this mystery and try to demystify it. And there are allies who are there to help you demystify.
Most people fight for their five minutes of time. A doctor-patient relationship is one of the most fragile and powerful in society. Who else do you turn to, other than family, to get you to a better place? So we knew we had something interesting here. It was not until the first commercial success and then Netflix wanting to do the next show that we realized we had something interesting. It created more experimentation in the category, more experimentation on how we could take the brand permission that we had and push it in different directions, really exploring the intersection of health and culture, which healthcare never does.
Jesse Roesler: Well, not only were you pioneering in the format of the stories and how they show up, but also in what the relationship is. I would love to be explicit because it is so unique. You are not funding these projects. They are coming to you, and your brand is in the DNA of the story because it is set there. You know there are going to be stories that contain hero's journeys. The stakes could not be higher in that environment—great drama. It has all the recipe for great storytelling, and you are at the core of it. You do not have ultimate control. I would love to talk about how that works. Like, what do you have control over, and what are you trading, and what are you getting in return?
Ramon Soto: It is a great question. Historically, on the branded content side, the model was: you write a check for distribution, and that was unaffordable to us at this scale. We are a regional health system talking about national and global content. So finding the right partners who were gifted storytellers and had the right content as the core DNA, and who were really looking at it from a partnership standpoint, was super important.
The guys who did the first Netflix show, Lenox Hill, are purpose-driven, mission-driven storytellers. Their interest is really in improving the human condition through these powerful stories. Immediately, we felt alignment in our DNA. They had already shopped the series and got distribution access to Netflix. Call it dumb luck or Lady Luck—I call it fortuitous, right place at the right time—but that allowed us to not worry about the distribution piece, as it was already locked in, and focus on superior content creation and the power of the storytelling.
We did not realize until afterward that we probably could not have done it any other way. We could not have afforded to do it any other way. But it solidified in our mind that we had a unique model where the purpose behind what we do—creating better health for all—was the platform. Could we partner with others who had expertise and passion behind different aspects of healthcare to create the content? Because we have so much of it. Now, the pivot for us is that we will still do that content and partner, but how do we tell a few more stories that we want to tell?
Mental health is a perfect example. Northwell actually loses $100 million a year on providing mental health services to society, but society needs mental health services more now than ever. It is supercharged out of the pandemic—really the silent epidemic—where so many people are suffering. The data is terrible. One out of every two individuals in this country knows or has a family member who is going through a mental health issue. The science is there to get people to a better state of health. We need more awareness, more open conversations, and we need to destigmatize it. For us, it was really part of the mission to tell that story. That led to our latest initiative, a film in collaboration with HBO called “One South” that followed, I think, 12 college students who tried to commit suicide and were admitted to a psych unit for deep intervention.
It is not content for everybody. It is a two-hour docudrama. The first hour is really tough because you see kids in crisis. My favorite is the second hour, where you see kids recovering and thriving and how normal they all look. This is just disease and health affecting somebody in a different way, affecting your brain. Northwell’s purpose here was to help one person. If we help one person who can reach out for help, raise their hand, and have a conversation, that will be an imminent success.
By the way, I did not answer one of your earlier questions about how we got it approved and how we got it through our organization. That is critically important because if we had gone the normal route, it never would have happened. You’d hit bureaucracy. There are too many easy reasons to say no. The risk is significant because we are dealing with patient privacy. We are a $20 billion shop. If you slip up, you are writing checks in the millions of dollars. So we partnered with our legal team to fully understand the risk and how we controlled it. This was an act of our CEO, who is a true believer, a hard charger who does not believe in the status quo and wants to smash it. He does not believe healthcare is where it needs to be. He personally took a bet and said, “Hey, this sounds really interesting. Sounds like we could do some good. Let’s do it.” Once he said yes, everybody lined up. It was still really hard to do. We learned a lot, made some mistakes, and recovered from those mistakes. But it created momentum, and that momentum was its own currency. The commercial success allowed us to do the next project, and the next, and the next. We are still learning. I consider myself a novice. I know enough to chart out a path. I am naive enough to not be afraid.
Jesse Roesler: It is actually the perfect blend. It usually makes the best stuff, right there. That is the recipe. You have got it. It is all good. Add a C-suite advocate or ambassador. That is part of it.
Ramon Soto: Michael Dowling, our CEO. I have been there 10 years. I went to Northwell for the man crush. The guy is just an amazing person, an amazing individual, larger than life, big Irish guy, huge hands. He really believes in change and is passionate about marching healthcare forward. You could do a separate podcast just on him—an amazing personality.
Jesse Roesler: Well, yeah. It is such an unexpected, innovative model. Whenever I have worked in healthcare, the trick is that when you are telling a story, it is pretty much always in the past, which is hard, right? You have to either do recreations or see this unfold in real time. With these college kids, especially—how thrilling. I mean, it is so rare to get that opportunity. To be clear about what we started to talk about earlier, essentially you are trading access, which is what storytellers need. And then, I think you said, how did you set up trading IP for access?
Ramon Soto: IP for access. So, we retain none of the IP. If it is branded content, I am writing a big check, but I hold all the assets. In this case, the brand shows up. We give the platform over to the storytellers. The showrunners create the content. The showrunners are responsible for the distribution of the content. In terms of economic benefit, the studios and the showrunners are the ones that gain financially. We gain on the brand side. It really is an interesting win-win scenario.
It is a model that we have found others are intrigued by because we will give really deep access. I have film crews in the operating room filming the removal of a neoblastoma—a cancer of the brain. Intricate operations. We need low-impact film crews who are highly trained on how to interact in a clinical setting. They cannot impact the workflow. At the same time, they have to get the money shot and be able to tell the story. If you see it happen, it is an interesting dance that is perfected over time, and there is a lot of trust involved. But it has worked out to date. We have built a skill set to minimize the risk.
Jesse Roesler: How does that show up for you? I mean, the producers know they just got the scene that they never would have gotten. On the back end, when it comes out, how are you seeing your brand be lifted? Is it awareness? I think I read something about referrals to your neurologist. I am sure there are many ways that shows up.
Ramon Soto: So, let’s dig into that. The benefits of the model are fascinating. The core to the success is not to compromise with storytelling. I do not insert a soda can here to get that great shot. It needs to be authentic. It needs to be a stellar storytelling arc and a compelling narrative. We do a lot to ensure that happens. We do casting calls for the types of physicians that show up. Can they carry the story? Are they interesting, intriguing personalities? We do the same thing on the patient side. The yield is quite low because you want to get those compelling stories. When we filmed Emergency NYC, our second Netflix show, the production team filmed seven terabytes of content and used less than 10% of it.
Jesse Roesler: It sounds tiny. Pretty typical for documentary, but it is nuts when you do not work in that field.
Ramon Soto: It is. We did not realize that going in. It was one of those things where we were naive. The amount of work to capture that content versus what was used was challenging. That 10%—you are probably taking 50% of that and leaving it on the cutting room floor through the edit process. When we show up in edit, we typically retain two rights. One is patient privacy, and that is sacrosanct. If we breach patient privacy, it just does not go into the film. Our edit reviews are probably enough to make any content creator’s hair turn gray. We will have a team of 20 people in the room doing the edit.
Jesse Roesler: Wow.
Ramon Soto: Their job is to review the content, provide notes, and timestamp the notes. I have everybody from quality to the specific service line that the subject is around. Doctors are in the room. Nurses are in the room. Safety officers are in the room. Legal is in the room. I am in the room. We are all watching from a different vantage point. Patient privacy is paramount. The second right is ensuring a safe environment. That encompasses a lot, including how the brand shows up and whether we are practicing safe medicine. Some of that is subjective, but it leads to conversations with the showrunners about how content was captured. Is it compelling content? Should it be in the show or not? Luckily, those types of comments are minimal.
The legal rights end there. We do not interject ourselves in the storytelling process. We will offer a point of view, but it leads to a conversation with the editors and showrunners during the edit process to pull out the best of the work. Sometimes those are heated exchanges, and sometimes they are simple discussions. The best work is created when there is respect on both sides. Then, it goes to final edit on our review process. Once we sign the release, it is done, and the distributors do their own edit process. It is produced, distributed, premiered, and aired, and then we get to see what happens.
On the benefit side, let’s stick with “Emergency NYC” because it had so much viewership. We saw interesting things happen. We measure everything. We pulled a control sample of individuals who were not exposed to the content and got brand metrics—typical funnel metrics—on their perception of the Northwell brand. Then, we analyzed that versus individuals who had seen the content. It is not unlike if you did an advertising campaign—pre-post—what is the impact of your campaign? Across the board, there were literally monster improvements in brand perception. It fit with the strategy. The strategy was, how do we have people know us before they need us? I do not want to fight for your mindshare when you are going through a health event. It is the worst time to fight. I will still do it, but it is very inefficient. How do I build a relationship or at least engagement well beforehand?
To me, the most impressive one was the purchase preference gain. It was like a 25% gain on purchase preference. Now I have people in line to shop with me when they need me. That tangibly leads to volume gains for us. Because of platforms like Netflix and its global reach, our referral patterns were changing. Our doctors in the show are fielding calls from patients in Italy, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia. It is wild. It is the beginning of a brand transformation from a super-regional health system—we are probably the 10th largest health system in the United States—to both a national and international brand.
Right. Because we are in New York, I have JFK and LaGuardia right next door, literally like seven miles away. It is super easy for them to fly in and experience the system. One little-known fact—three years ago, the majority of our volume was New York-based, but we still had individuals who came from across the country. I probably had 20 states represented in terms of people who got on a plane to get services at Northwell. At the end of these docudramas, all 50 states were represented. People in Alaska are getting on a flight and coming to our institutions to seek services. So, there is definitely a business benefit and economic benefit for Northwell. There is also a brand and reputational benefit for Northwell. It just comes with really thoughtful risk management of all the potential downsides.
Jesse Roesler: It is so fascinating. I am curious about two things in terms of measurement. Have you ever benchmarked that with, like, okay, we know how the preference grew and, by doing the focus group, people who have seen it versus those who have not—have you ever done a traditional ad campaign and done the same before and after?
Ramon Soto: Sure. We measure everything. In traditional ad campaigns, you put out content, and you can see the qualitative difference in content. Really good content is going to spike above traditional content. We subscribe to a national database that imports advertising from health systems across the country—thousands of campaigns—so we can benchmark our regional work against others across the U.S. We are typically pretty good storytellers ourselves, and our work benchmarks above the national average and regional average in the New York market. That strategy is born from the same playbook, by the way. Because we take this longitudinal view and try to talk about issues that are relevant to consumers—I was the first in the nation to do a gun violence campaign in the New York market—and that campaign, I was not selling anything.
I was trying to alert parents that guns are now the leading cause of death of children in the U.S. and there is this new hidden danger they have to protect their kids from. It was almost more public service-like.
Jesse Roesler: Sounds like a PSA.
Ramon Soto: It created purchase preference. It was the weirdest thing, but I was pleased about it. We measured it. It is typically basis points. You can see the jump, but you are in a 10-point range of improvements across traditional brand metrics: awareness, consideration, preference, likelihood to recommend.
It is a whole other scale when you have eight episodes and probably six hours of content that consumers can immerse themselves in—39 million hours of viewership. I cannot afford that many 30-second ads.
Jesse Roesler: That is a ridiculous number.
Ramon Soto: And then even the earned media, because of the novelty of it, generates its own benefit. People start thinking of your health system a little differently and a little more positively. By the way, that all has to be managed. The slippery slope is, "Hey, why are you doing this? Should you not be spending that money on healthcare and delivering better healthcare?" The reality is we do not spend any money on this. That is the uniqueness of the model.
It creates this value creation, value capture where all the stakeholders involved really benefit. It is unique to us. You might be asking why we are talking about the secret sauce. I actually hope others jump in and do this. I think the benefit accrues to consumers—more awareness of health, the fragility of it, the power of it, and the social impact of what is going on in society: climate change, women’s health, gun violence, mental health. We need more conversation around this, not less. This becomes an interesting paradigm to engage in it—one act of many—but still, the cumulative effect can be powerful.
Jesse Roesler: It is just so hard to quantify all the benefits that get stacked on top of one another. If you can quantify what you are not spending that you would have had to spend, which would come back in your cost to the consumer or the patient, to think about what you would have had to spend in ad buys to get that same reach—you could not do it any other way. But then also, you are talking about things like gun violence and the one special that are important to you from a brand values perspective. That lets people know what you care about and stand for. Then there is the PSA part of just talking about these issues, like taking the stigma away from mental health in young people. It is benefit after benefit.
Ramon Soto: Now, let’s talk about the downside of it. It can be disruptive, so you really have to manage how you do this well. Because we are very tight on the storytelling, we do casting calls, and there are people who do not make it on the screen. So, you have personalities and processes to manage. What happens if a consumer that you filmed says, "Hey, you are done with production, you are about to air," and then someone wants to backtrack and says, "Hey, that mental health thing is really personal. I do not know if I want to share that." You need mechanisms and controls to manage the downside risk. One lawsuit, and we are a $20 billion shop writing a huge check.
My advice to other brands as they think through how they can create value through their IP is, if you are going to go down this purpose-driven path, execute with purpose. You must be super intentional about it. You really have to be thoughtful about how you are going to execute, and you have to be a sponge to understand the upside and downside. The novelty is one thing, but when you are faced with these challenges—and we have had individuals who, post-film, say, "Hey, I think I want to go in a different direction"—you must be ready for those extraneous events that can derail projects and manage the risk.
That is probably the biggest challenge in all this. You are dealing with super sensitive issues. You are dealing with the vagaries of individuals. If you are not ready for it, you can create a conversation in society that you may not want to have. No brand wants a Bud Light moment. You are dealing with social issues. ESG is under attack. Diversity, equity, inclusion is under attack. Women’s health is under attack. You are looking at sides of the equation that want to create issues behind some of these stories. You must be very intentional. We have active conversations. We have a really active risk management process. We are best buds with our lawyers, who we love. We could not do this without them. We reach out for external legal counsel—really gifted ones who understand the entertainment side. We seek advice from professionals on brand risk as well. It is a full-throated analysis of the upside and downside. Knock on wood, I am still here, and we are still doing more projects, so all good.
Jesse Roesler: I am glad you call that out because with great reward comes great risk. You have learned how to minimize it. You have got a great legal team that helps you minimize it. I think there is huge potential in healthcare because it is so rare to hear about. But I love the idea of other industries starting to think about what this could mean in their world. How could this translate to other industries? My mind went right to sports teams. The access from getting into the locker room for those sorts of films or pictures and the trade-off could get up in there. I know you come from GE originally, right? There are many companies with fascinating things happening behind usually closed doors. I am curious what your thoughts are.
Ramon Soto: Maybe a little bit of advice to other brands: I think we need more experimentation, not less. Models that work should be exploited in the best use of that word—those models that work. Performance marketing, putting stimulus in the market, having consumers react, measuring it—that is never going away. That is bread and butter. But we need more thought behind how we break out of convention and engage with consumers differently. No one has any more time. Content is fleeting. Consumers are fickle. How do you build and engage a deeper relationship with them? That requires a bit of thought.
This is a story I tell, but I cut my teeth in advertising. My first job was with McCann Erickson in the late '80s. My second job was working on the AT&T account in the early '90s. I learned a lot about storytelling and engagement early in my career. When I left advertising, I jumped over to the client side and worked for General Electric. General Electric, at one point, was the most valuable company in America during the Jack Welch era—a hard charger, incredible storytellers, with a diverse business portfolio. Everything from financial services to nuclear power plants to aircraft engines to MRI machines. How do you tie all that together? How do you make it compelling? They were the first to show me this need to click up and understand the power of what you do. They summarized that in a powerful tagline.
GE was around this concept of bringing good things to life and how they fueled the life that you live. From there, think about how you can flex that platform from a brand standpoint—just incredibly powerful. At Northwell, we undertook a very similar process. What do we truly stand for? As an organization, we believe in democratizing access to great care. We simplified our value proposition to this simple concept: better health for all. It is super powerful, and it means a lot of important things. It means that it is a tragedy when where you live dictates how long you live. We have these things called food deserts in the United States. That is just the most perverse concept to me. The richest nation in the world, and we are challenged by social issues that impact us and need to be addressed.
How do we use our platform to do good and address some of those social issues? That territory, once you make that pivot, becomes an interesting platform to explore different ways of showing up to individuals. Experimentation can be super powerful. It can lead to failures as well. I remember trying to take my pediatrics brand and create something that competed with some of the most storied pediatric brands in the U.S. Think about what Shriners does and what St. Jude’s does—very powerful philanthropic brands that generate billions of dollars of donations.
I spent millions of dollars trying to create a sub-brand that was super powerful. Who does not want to care for and protect their children? Complete failure. It was an intention to explore and see how far we could push the brand. I learned a lot—learned what we could do, what we could not do, the upside, the downside—applied that learning, and moved on. We will continue to experiment. We are eager to; we are just looking for like-minded partners who are going to help us do that.
Jesse Roesler: Well, on that note, I know you are in the process of evolving your model a bit about how these films take shape. Do you care to share where you are headed?
Ramon Soto: Absolutely. Today, Northwell announced that we are creating Northwell Studios. This will be a dedicated arm of our organization that focuses on content creation. We will pump more of these entertainment initiatives through. Most people ask, “What does that really mean?” We will do more of the scripted and unscripted content that comes to us from third parties who want to tell health-related stories. We will still act as that platform for them. But we are also going to start to explore topics that we want to talk about more. It will allow us to show up differently when we create that content, to co-produce that content, and to negotiate distribution differently with that content. It is a powerful opportunity to evolve the platform. We have also partnered with a company called Creative Chaos, which is helping us develop several initiatives that are in various phases of maturity—some really near-term, some a bit longer term.
It is the next chapter in experimentation. I am really excited about it. It gives us momentum, and hopefully, we can do a lot more social good and achieve brand benefits at the same time. I love this concept of an organization doing well by doing good. I cannot think of another industry like healthcare where that model is not applicable. As I said before, I hope more individuals take a page out of the playbook and start doing things just like this.
Jesse Roesler: I love that ethos, and I love that you are continuing with the experimentation. I am sure a lot of us will be following along.
To watch excerpts from Northwell Health’s award-winning “Emergency NYC,” visitwww.northwell.edu/emergency-nyc. The two-part documentary “One South: Portrait of a Psych Unit” is now streaming on HBO Max. I hope you have been enjoying the podcast, and I would love to hear from you. If you have ideas for guests or topics for future episodes, drop me a note at jesse@credononfiction.com.
