“Making Cancer History” History
By
Leonard Zwelling
It’s not like me to return to a subject upon which I have already commented. Wait a minute! Of course, it is. The subject is the poor leadership of my former place of employment and what it has done to the academic, intellectual, and interpersonal culture at MD Anderson over the past 25 years. In summary, nothing good.
The other day I touched on the issue of Dr. Pisters’ latest way to waste money. That would be the conversion of the MD Anderson logo and the phasing out of the Mendelsohnian phrase, “Making Cancer History.”
Now let me just say that I have been through more than a few public relations campaigns at Anderson. Even before I began as a faculty member, I had purchased one of the tee shirts that read: Fighting Cancer, Now That’s a Job. I still have it, but even though I have lost over 20 pounds, I doubt I can fit into it today. I was still running when I bought that red tee. I was also 35. Oh, well.
Then there was the amazing use of then cutting-edge photographic technology that showed a patient doing something athletic and then the image would stop and there would be a 360-degree panorama of the patient after which the motion would restart and the figure would complete whatever athletic activity he or she was doing. That was supposed to represent a cancer patient whose life had stopped due to the disease and how MD Anderson got the patient back into the game. It was really effective and caused quite a stir in the mid-1990s.
The next big leap in marketing at the UT Cancer Center was the use of “Making Cancer History.” My research shows that, indeed, this really was trademarked and first used by MD Anderson. Co-pilot can find no evidence of its prior use.
Since that time, it has become synonymous with MD Anderson. The red line through the word cancer both in “Making Cancer History” and in MD Anderson Cancer Center was so pervasive that the red line alone told the story. Now that’s effective marketing and John Mendelsohn should get full credit for it.
More recently, TV commercials have used the phrase “whatever it takes” as a commitment to cancer patients to do just that to make them well. I actually liked that one a great deal.
Personally, I think that is a mighty distinguished track record in the area of public relations for a cancer center. So why change anything now?
After reading the associated email from Dr. Pisters I have come away with the feeling that he just needed something of his own and paid a consultant a great deal of money, no doubt, for which he got very little. In turn, if he really will be changing the logo on everything associated with MD Anderson, it will cost millions. Think about it.
Buildings
Stationery
Business cards
Ad copy and TV commercials
All the airport signage
Name badges
I’m sure you can think of even more.
It does seem ridiculous for Pisters to constantly push the faculty to accrue more RVUs while he spends money on consultants and logo changes which certainly appear to me to be nonsense.
Give John Mendelsohn credit. He took “Making Cancer History” a long, long way. He took it so far that it has become synonymous with the institution. As long as anyone lives who was around in the early 2000s and continues to breath, MD Anderson’s logo will be “Making Cancer History.” Heck, the 2009 book by James Olson about MD Anderson’s history is called Making Cancer History.
This latest Pisters nonsense is just another in a long line of inexplicable decisions by the current leadership of MD Anderson that make no sense at all. What will be the return on investment on this expenditure? I suspect very little.
When will someone, anyone, ask this guy why he makes the decisions he does. You got me. We can be sure it will be no one in Austin. They are too busy making higher education history.
4 thoughts on ““Making Cancer History” History”
“You can change the name of the restaurant, but if you don’t change the cooks…”
The cooks are fine; the owners less so.
Although this has nothing to do with the message behind your blog post – here is my recollection of where Making Cancer History came from.
The tag line Making Cancer History came out in the late 1990’s. It first appeared in what was the first TV Ad that the institution put out. It was created by the Richards company in Dallas. When the decision to create an advertising campaign was made Martyn Howgill (newly appointed director of marketing) arranged for a shoot out between the three companies that responded to his request., Steve Stuyck and I were the other two people asked to review the ads. The Richards company wanted to do the ads in part because one of their employees had been treated by the institution. The founder himself presented and they were clearly the best Their ad focused on a woman cancer survivor hitting a golf ball in a sand trap. It ended with the tag line with the red line through Cancer. I remember it well. It would have come out in about 1998/99. It is actually still available on their website.
We liked the Ad a lot and immediately considered it as a possible logo. At the time the line was copyrighted by a small biotech company (I forget their name). Martyn asked for permission to use it and was refused. He persisted and it turned out that the company was doing studies at MD Anderson and with the help of one of our investigators the company was convinced to give us the rights to the line. That process took a few years to be worked out. We used the line from the start but not officially
In typical MD Anderson fashion there followed months of discussion about using it as a logo, should it have the red line? etc. Once the copyright was obtained they made it an official logo
At the time the first ad was created the whole concept of advertising a state institution in competition with local private docs was controversial to say the least, There were lots of complaints when the ad campaign ran.
Was there more to the story? perhaps Steve Stuyck has other memories. Martyn died a few years ago. He considered its’ development one of his greatest marketing accomplishments
Thanks Marty for clarity above and beyond that of Co-Pilot. This is a great story that has served the institution well all these many years. LZ