W.Va. businesses strike gold promoting good health

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Nobody has health problems like West Virginia, and maybe that’s why the state is beginning to become known for its knack in fighting those health problems.

“We’ve gotten good practice,” says Ralph Gaines, chief executive of Charleston-based beBetter Networks Inc., a wellness consulting company. “We’ve developed a real expertise.”

The state leads the nation in the percentage of women who smoke during pregnancy, younger adults who smoke and people who suffer heart attacks, strokes and from heart disease, among other maladies.

“With West Virginia’s smoking issue, weight issue, there’s no question that many people need services like ours,” Gaines said.

BeBetter runs corporate-wellness programs such as organizing health screenings and assessments and it’s experiencing massive growth. Though founded in the state, it now gets 73 percent of its business from out of state, Gaines said. And this year, its revenues will double over last year through “organic” growth, not from big mergers, he said.

Similarly to beBetter, Charleston’s Arnold Agency advertising firm has built on its state public-health contract to land related business. It won the Department of Health and Human Resources’ communications contract two years ago and set to work with passion, says Bruce Adkins, director of DHHR’s Division of Tobacco Prevention.

“They have become an adjunct staff to the division,” he said. “They’ve really bought into it.”

West Virginia’s enormous problems with tobacco addiction demanded ambitious responses, and that’s what they’re getting, says Scot Drake, Arnold’s vice president for marketing communications. “We introduced the idea that they could market and promote in these areas, and it really exploded,” he said.

West Virginia is first, for instance, in developing a multimedia campaign to fight spit-tobacco use, Drake said. “We’re the leader in the nation with cessation/prevention dealing with spit tobacco,” he said.

That kind of leadership has put it on other states’ radar screens. Montana, which also contends with high rates of spit-tobacco use, picked Arnold for its $1 million spit-tobacco-cessation campaign in August, in a competitive bidding process. (Arnold’s West Virginia DHHR contract size varies from year to year, depending on how much grant funding is secured from the federal government and other grant sources, says Arnold’s chairwoman and chief executive, Linda Arnold. But last year, it was worth about $2 million, she said.)

In business 19 years, Arnold has developed specialties in handling public relations for the banking, energy, health-care and legal industries. But public health has emerged as its new strength, Arnold says.

With more companies and governments discerning the good sense of emphasizing prevention, wellness is a vibrant industry to be in, beBetter’s Gaines says.

Among beBetter’s big state contracts are a $2 million assignment to conduct health screenings for the state Public Employees Insurance Agency and a $1.3 million contract to run the Bureau for Public Health’s quit-smoking phone line. Its private clients include Arch Coal, Jackson Kelley and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Gaines wouldn’t disclose annual revenues. The company employs about 100 and plans to hire more, he said.

Arnold’s anti-tobacco campaigns attest to the firm’s acute, firsthand understanding of tobacco’s costly toll as well as a personal stake in seeing it dealt with, Adkins said.
“Everybody thinks a media agency is in it to win awards, but they’re not,” he said.

"They’re a West Virginia company that wants to help West Virginians.”

He cited one commercial Arnold produced featuring a father-and-son hunting outing, where the tradition of hunting was being passed on to the next generation along with the tradition of spit-tobacco use.

“I’m not sure I would have ever thought to use a hunting father and son,” he said. “But, wow, what an effective ad.”

Judging from the uptick in calls to the tobacco-cessation hot line advertised in the ad, immediately after the ad airs, Adkins said he considers the ad one of the agency’s most effective. Calls were up 25 percent on average, and as much as 40 percent in some markets, he said.

For the state’s Raze campaign targeting young people’s smoking, Arnold enlisted West Virginia kids’ help. The resulting ads resemble music videos and take unconventional anti-tobacco tacks, not emphasizing that smoking is unhealthy but rather that big tobacco companies manipulate their customers and pollute the environment. These were themes likelier to resonate with West Virginia teens, Drake said.

“Kids told us, We know tobacco causes cancer,”’ he said. “They’re more interested in the environment, and they don’t like to be told what to do or be manipulated.”
Drake said the seriousness of West Virginia’s health problems is a big motivator. “We’re saving people’s lives here, we’re not just driving cash-register sales or directing people to Web sites,” he said. “We’re literally preventing pregnant moms from smoking.”