Like many health systems, Morgantown, W.Va.-based WVU Medicine has dealt with increased vaccine hesitancy among parents since the pandemic.
To add to that, West Virginia already struggles with access to care and nearly enacted a law allowing nonmedical exemptions for immunizations.
So the 25-hospital system enlisted its marketing department for help.
“Vaccine hesitancy has risen over the last few years and is being amplified on social media,” Jeffrey Lancaster, MD, associate chief medical officer of WVU Medicine Golisano Children’s Hospital, told Becker’s. “One of the things the medical community didn’t appreciate and respond to fast enough was how effective those messages are.”
The result: “Let’s Talk,” a marketing campaign that appeared on TV, billboards, digital channels, print ads and in-clinic banners in West Virginia during back-to-school season this year.
“This is an invitation to come and talk and say, ‘Hey, you probably do have questions. You’re getting information from a lot of different places at various volumes,'” Dr. Lancaster said. “Our job as advocates for children is to entertain all of these questions and assuage all of these doubts and fears, and so far, it seems like it’s been very successful.”
In the commercials, “the providers are the ones delivering the message. It’s them saying, ‘We’re here. We understand. We know being a parent is hard,'” said Kathryn Vey, manager of marketing and communications for WVU Medicine Golisano Children’s. “And if we can do one thing to make that easier for Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, we’re absolutely willing to do that.”
The campaign was designed to meet parents where they were (i.e. in a medical appointment with their kids) and depoliticize the topic through person-to-person conversation. WVU Medicine, the state’s largest health system (and private employer), also leveraged the strong affinity its brand and children’s hospital have across West Virginia.
“We wanted to offer [parents] a safe place where they felt like they wouldn’t be judged,” said Anthony Condia, chief marketing and communications officer of WVU Medicine.
The photography and videos focused on the clinician-child connection, while the campaign’s color palette leaned lighter, tapping into the health system’s gold rather than its more dominant navy blue to feel more “approachable” and “dynamic,” said Lauren Lamb, manager of brand design for WVU Medicine.
It also helped that West Virginia’s Republican governor (and now U.S. senator) vetoed the nonmedical vaccine exemption in 2024. West Virginia is one of five states that allows only medical reasons for students to miss immunizations. Even so, requests for vaccine exemptions in the state grew from about 100 annually to 500 in 2025.
While WVU Medicine doesn’t have hard data yet on infections this year, the legislative push for exemptions has calmed and the campaign reminded clinicians to set aside time for vaccine talk. Herd immunity rates in the state for preventable childhood diseases also remain above 95%.
Still, even if the bill hadn’t been vetoed, access, not hesitancy, would have been the bigger barrier to childhood vaccination, Dr. Lancaster said. West Virginia has a population of 1.7 million people spread across 24,000 square miles. Needing vaccines to attend school is a strong motivator to drive even long distances for an appointment.
Leadership buy-in for the campaign was strong since the idea originated from a regular meeting of the health system’s CEO and hospital presidents. It also didn’t require a huge investment as the campaign was threaded into WVU Medicine’s existing regional media agreements.
“We kind of painted the town for an extended period with this campaign, and then as we moved past the start of the new school year, we scaled it back,” Mr. Condia said. “West Virginians care very much about their kids and rally around them … so we wanted to just put that out there in the public domain in a way that we hoped would resonate with people.”
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