AbbaDox

Streamlining Chaos

Imaging center patients haul paperwork in wheelbarrows.

Watch the full campaign · 1:17

The Strategy

AbbaDox makes software for outpatient imaging centers, the places you go for an MRI or an X-ray. It runs the front office: scheduling, intake forms, insurance checks, and the stream of faxed orders from doctors. The people who buy it run those centers, and most of them have worked every job in one, from the front desk on up.

AbbaDox had been around for 20 years, but people in the field had only started hearing its name in the last few. Its marketing team found us through our ads on LinkedIn and wanted that kind of fun for AbbaDox. The goal was simple: get known.

When we talked through the first scripts, AbbaDox set one rule. The admins and the patients are never the joke. The old tools are. So every ad drops a capable, worn-out staff into a system that buries them in paper, and lets the paper be the villain.

The 30-second spot opens behind the check-in counter. One admin has hit her limit. Her coworker walks up wearing a vending tray stacked with intake forms, his own fix for a paper problem, and swears it beats the wheelbarrows. Beside her, a fax machine has been printing onto a pile on the floor for longer than he'd guess. Then the receptionist, the only one not in scrubs, has some news.

The 15-second follow-ups move to the other side of the counter. A patient in a neck brace and a sling checks in, and the receptionist sets one more form on his stack. In the other, she's still on hold about his estimate, and he wonders if he should grab a magazine. Two 6-second reminders close it out: a calendar wall papered over with notes, and a waiting room with one man in it.

The Process

AbbaDox didn't just send notes on our scripts. Its team took them to a workshop with industry veterans and some of its own clients, then came back with what landed and what didn't. A loud fax machine meant nothing to people who work in imaging centers. Paper everywhere meant everything. Each ad is built around one of the pains AbbaDox's buyers rank highest: scheduling, intake forms, faxes, insurance estimates and no-shows.

They checked the set the same way. An outpatient imaging center isn't a hospital, so the X-ray light boxes and privacy curtains came out. The lead vests could hang in the back, since only technologists wear them. The admins got royal blue scrubs, because teal reads as a doctor. And the receptionist got a suit, so the one person with good news looks different from everyone drowning around her.

Not every note won. AbbaDox's team worried the wheelbarrows were too weird and suggested five-gallon buckets instead. We pushed back. The weirdness is the reason anyone remembers a wheelbarrow full of forms, and paper piled in a bucket is hard to read on screen. It took some back and forth, but once we talked it through, they saw it too. The wheelbarrows stayed, and they became the sight gag people remember.

We shot it all in one day, in an empty office building we dressed as an imaging center's front desk and waiting room. The fax gag is real. A steady stream of fresh sheets ran out of the machine and onto a pile that kept growing, all real paper, with nothing added in editing. It took a lot of paper.

AbbaDox got a 30-second spot, two 15-second follow-ups, two 6-second reminders and a library of photos from set. AbbaDox ran the ads itself.

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