Celebrity-backed shows make bold pitches to health care companies — and charge big bucks. But the experiences don’t always deliver
For the small health care company, it sounded almost too good to be true: James Earl Jones would introduce a short educational video about its work, which would be distributed to public television stations and could be viewed by as many as 60 million Americans.
“It was gonna go out into the PBS community, and we [were] gonna get all of this visibility, and millions of people were gonna see it,” said Denise Kalos, the chief executive officer of the company, Affirmativ Health, which develops personalized care plans for patients with Alzheimer’s.
It didn’t pan out like she had hoped.
The arrangement worked this way: The Florida production company organizing the deal, Education Alliance, would produce the segment for public television at no charge for a series called “Front Page,” one of several public television series it produces. Affirmativ Health would serve as a “content expert” for the public television video, according to a contract reviewed by STAT.
As a “special thanks,” the production company would also create a five-minute corporate video with interviews, graphics, and narration, and a one-minute “commercial segment” that would be broadcast twice during prime-time hours on a big-name network and hundreds more times with regional airings during prime-time on networks including CNN, CNBC, and the Family Channel.
That part had a price tag. The corporate video and commercial came with an “underwriting fee” of $23,900, which included the cost of placing the commercial on TV — plus an extra $3,500 “location fee” to shoot at Affirmativ’s California headquarters.
“It all sounded very exciting,” Kalos told
