Company: Piedmont Healthcare, Atlanta, GA
Entry Submitted By: Ames Scullin O'Haire Advertising
Company Description: Piedmont Healthcare is a not-for-profit metro-Atlanta healthcare system that includes five hospitals and 100+ physician offices
Nomination Category: Marketing Professional / Organization Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Matt Gove, Chief Marketing Officer

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2012 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

In October 2011, Atlanta’s Piedmont Healthcare (Piedmont) hired Matt Gove as its new chief marketing officer.  After spending his first two months meeting with leaders and marketing-team members, he began 2012 by turning marketing upside down at Piedmont.

In just one year, Matt Gove restructured and grew the marketing department while leading the rebrand of the 107-year-old healthcare system, and helped Piedmont achieve its volume growth goals in 2012 after the system had experienced years of decline. 

Piedmont is made up of five hospitals and 114 physician offices across Georgia.  Before Gove, the system faced many challenges: an outdated look and feel from 1976; an inefficiently structured marketing team; and partner marketing agencies that were not pulling their weight.

Before Matt started at Piedmont, the corporate marketing team was structured around skills and tasks (media relations, publications, etc.) instead of service lines (heart health, women’s services, cancer, etc.) with no clearly organized structure. Matt realized Piedmont’s marketing team would better function by assigning “account managers” to own individual service line needs and serve as the point people on related projects.  As a result, communications became consistent, and internal clients – doctors, physicians, surgeons, etc. – can now rely on one person in their practice areas.

Gove used the money he saved from severing ties with agencies that did not provide strong rates of return to double the size of the internal marketing team.  Gove created several new positions, including “Director of Digital Marketing” and “Director of Community Benefit,” and built a team solely dedicated to producing content. The new content team creates videos for doctors’ bios, surgeries and new services for Piedmont’s news site, HealthWatchMD.com. Through all the new content, Matt knew Piedmont would be able to capture potential patients during their online research.  The new content also became an invaluable resource for the PR and social-media teams.  Matt also moved the government-relations department under him and provided resources to the community benefit function to best serve Piedmont and its patients. 

Gove also headed up an aggressive rebrand and convinced Piedmont’s leadership to take a risk on a supporting ad campaign that went against most healthcare advertising.   Gove knew that, even though healthcare ads had always focused on features (awards, technology, equipment and achievements), they were often ineffective at yielding volume growth, and that Piedmont should take a different approach.  Realizing that no healthcare ad could be successful at convincing someone who wasn’t in need of health services to take action, Matt focused on building an emotional connection between the brand and consumers. Matt knew that, if you want to sell to customers, you should tout how your services can impact their everyday lives – even before they need those services.   With leadership support, he launched a healthcare ad campaign focusing on how Piedmont helps make lives “Better.” An initial month-over-month awareness and preference study by National Research Corporation’s Ticker Division shows: top of mind awareness: +23 percent; best overall quality: +66 percent; and best doctors: +58 percent. 

Gove’s work is a true example of how a great marketing leader can initiate a successful brand turnaround and make vital operations changes in just one year.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the nominee:

Matt Gove is Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, External Affairs for Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare, where he oversees marketing, communications, digital strategy, community benefit and government relations for the five-hospital system. Prior to joining Piedmont in 2011, Matt was a core member of the executive team that engineered an $80 million operational turnaround and raised more than $300 million for capital improvements at Grady Health System, helping revive the critical safety net institution. A commercial real estate refugee, Matt earlier served as an executive with Cousins Properties, launched a monthly commercial real estate magazine and also covered the real estate industry for Atlanta Business Chronicle. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Georgia State University and serves on the university’s Marketing Roundtable.