Who doesn’t remember the lilting CVS jingle of years ago, the three-tone ditty that went, in sing-song fashion, “Cee … VEEEE … Ehhhs!”
Depends on where you ask. Outside New England, forget about it.
“That was part of the challenge, to expand the brand nationally,” said Heidi Devlin, who as vice president of advertising for the Woonsocket-based drug-store giant now known as CVS Caremark Corp., is responsible for doing just that. “That jingle was during the days of CVS being a regional store.”
In 1980, the CVS empire was 400 stores in New England, with $414 million in annual sales. Today, there are more than 7,000 stores across the country and two in Puerto Rico, with annual revenue closing in on $100 billion, thanks in a big way to CVS snapping up regional chains such as Osco, Longs, Revco, Eckerd and Sav-on, as well as the pharmacy benefit-management business of Caremark. The acquisitions meant a change in advertising strategy depending on location, strategy led by folks like Devlin and a team of advertising specialists, both in-house and hired as needed.
“The big change was expanding into all sorts of different geographies, where the average customer had no idea who CVS was,” Devlin said. “The two main challenges were going from a regional company to being a national advertiser and managing that change from marketplace to marketplace. The task is different in New England than in Texas or Florida or California. It’s starting from scratch in some areas.”
Devlin has been a CVS employee for 25 years, 19 of them in advertising, and she has seen sea changes in her profession.
“Now people are bombarded with ad messages from more than 20 years ago,” she said. “It makes us have to be smarter about our media buying.”
In the old days, it was simple: Buy TV time and run successful ads, pat yourself on the back and think you did a good job, Devlin said. No more. Now, her job is to review the myriad ways there are to reach customers. For example, there is a new day-time talk show, “The Doctors,” on which CVS has worked out an arrangement to have CVS pharmacists appear.
“That’s a much better way to imbed yourself into the content than just buying ads, which of course we still do,” Devlin said, adding that CVS has also partnered with “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” and has supported 10 families, “which has been very effective.”
“What’s important is tonality, it has to be consistent with the corporate image, with how we want the viewing audience to perceive us,” Devlin said. “The heart of who we are is a health care provider. It’s very important our tone and manner is what you’d expect in health care, and that we convey authenticity and care and expertise.”
She knows people these days like edgy ads, but don’t expect them at CVS, which in one of its latest TV spots has an elderly woman kissing a coupon dispenser in appreciation of it. That’s about as edgy as CVS gets. But the ads Devlin and her team review and approve work, she said, evidenced by “an arsenal of measurement and tracking tools, we’re always monitoring how effective our ads are.”
Ads focus on women – women comprise 80 percent of the CVS customer base – so “you’re not going to see CVS ads in the Super Bowl or ‘Monday Night Football.’ ”
The ads are also geared toward the 35-and-older, female crowd, and then is skewed more heavily toward seniors, with heavy emphasis on the pharmacy component, because like it or not, “the older we get, the more we all need prescriptions,” Devlin said.
Social networking is a great ad outlet, too, she said, particularly Twitter.
“Our focus is on ‘ExtraCare’ (CVS successful customer-loyalty reward program), and we have a pretty active program with Twitter,” she said. “We monitor what people have to say online and in other social mediums, and find women talking about ExtraCare and deals and values. We opted to support those and participate in the conversation, so we tweet regularly about deals.”
The most challenging part of Devlin’s job is also the most rewarding, she said, bringing many ad disciplines and parties together to make ad campaigns come to life. There are roughly 100 people in the CVS advertising chain who work together, she said.
One of Devlin’s favorite CVS TV ad campaigns had pharmacists highlighted who had gone out of their way to help people, which caused other pharmacists to do even more to possibly get their own recognition. In the end, the customer benefited most of all, Devlin said.
But is another “Ceee … VEEE … Ehhs” in the company’s advertising future?
“The idea of a new jingle,” she laughed, “is not out of the question.” •
