Gretchen Bye, Creative Director at Partners in Napier, doesn’t mince words about marketing to Brooklynites: “They’ll call you out on your BS.” So when Maimonides Health needed to talk to women about everything from labor and delivery to breast cancer screenings, the agency had to get real—Brooklyn real.
Check out the video below in full, or chapter it up.
The Brief Was Actually Three Briefs
What started as a general healthcare ask quickly revealed itself as something more complex. The NICU, OB-GYN services, women’s health, and the Breast Center all needed attention. “The bucket was really big,” Bye recalls. Rather than try to be everything to everyone, they zeroed in on labor and delivery and the Breast Center—two moments where fear and uncertainty run highest.
Chasing the Weather (and Other Impossibilities)
Here’s what nobody tells you about photographing childbirth for an ad campaign: mothers who’ve just given birth aren’t exactly eager for their close-up. “None of us really want a photo shoot of ourselves pushing a watermelon out of a keyhole,” Bye notes with the kind of honesty that defines the entire campaign. The solution? Stock imagery that captured vulnerability as a strategic choice, not a production limitation.
The Mammogram Machine Stays Hidden
The team made a deliberate choice: no intimidating medical equipment. “As if going for a mammogram isn’t weird enough, don’t make it weirder by showing me the machine where it’s going to happen,” Bye explains. Instead, they showed women getting those nerve-wracking callback calls in familiar places—farmers markets, gas stations, the neighborhoods where life actually happens.
Breaking Even Is the Goal
When younger women in advertising ask Bye how she balances creativity, motherhood, and self-care, her answer cuts through the girl-boss mythology: “I don’t. My goal is to break even.” Some days she’s a great mother, some days a great creative director, rarely both at once. It’s this kind of radical honesty that informed the campaign’s approach.
Information Is Not Intimacy
Bye’s hill to die on: brands that confuse stats for connection. “There is nothing more intimate than your health and your body,” she insists. While competitors NYU Langone and Presbyterian talked over women’s heads with RTBs and machinery specs, Maimonides chose emotional intelligence and what Bye calls “a little bit of bedside manner.”
The result? Lines like “Welcome to Brooklyn—we say it over 6,000 times a year” that connect the pride of place with the pride of new motherhood. No martyrdom narratives. No “you can have it all” fantasies. Just the messy, beautiful truth of being human in Brooklyn, where authenticity isn’t a marketing strategy—it’s the only currency that matters.
Video Chapters
00:40 – The Brief Was Actually Three Briefs
02:03 – Chasing the Weather (and Other Impossibilities)
03:54 – The Mammogram Machine Stays Hidden
06:20 – Breaking Even Is the Goal
07:44 – Information Is Not Intimacy
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