Aya Healthcare was looking to do something different to raise recruitment and gain marketshare during the midst of an international nursing shortage. They had a $1 Million budget for marketing that had typically been spent on print ads in trade journals. In the seven years they had been in business they had an average year-over-year growth of 2.5%. Could we help them get over the 3% mark by taking their $1 Million budget to produce a reality show portraying the nursing profession as exciting and rewarding? It was an out of the box idea for sure, but would it pay off?
Our team got to work, structuring the show to maximize the impact both in the eyes of potential nurses and for the media coverage we hoped we’d be able to get. We spent a quarter of our budget renting a $10 Million mansion at Pelican Point, four doors down from Kobe Bryant, on the Newport coast, believing that detail would garner attention. The rest of the budget was managed wisely. Partnerships help minimize costs, and We stayed on budget. One week before the first episode aired online our team wrote a press release on PR Newswire positioning 13 Weeks as a much-needed “reality TV makeover for an ailing industry.” The nursing crisis was getting constant coverage, but would the news media bite on our novel solution?
They did. 13 Weeks received global news coverage on every major network and newspaper, and an average of 3.5 million views per episode. Aya became the #1 Staffing firm for travel nurses almost over night and Aya passed the billion dollar mark in annual revenue.
13 Weeks received the Media Award from the American Academy of Nursing, and 13 Weeks runaway success prompted a deal with MTV to produce the second season of the show for their network under the name Scrubbing In.
