From The March 2002 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

Sponsors See Sales Spike With TV Health News Segment

Marty Traynor Spencer

Wellness is a personal crusade for Denver naturopath James Rouse. He wanted to introduce a healthful lifestyle to consumers by teaching them about the benefits of organic and natural foods. Three years ago, he found the perfect partners to help him reach his goal.

Since then, KUSA channel 9News, the Denver area King Soopers grocery stores and a host of organic and natural foods producers have benefited from his passion for health and his TV spots called Optimum Wellness.

"I started after the Columbine [high school shooting] tragedy," Rouse said. "I felt we needed to make better choices. To me, it was a call to action."

His idea was to use his training as a naturopathic physician and his background as a cook—he put himself through school cooking at the sustainable and organic Common Sense Café in Portland, Ore.—to teach people that food can be one of their best medicines. And he wanted to use television to get his message out.

"I've heard that the most often repeated words in an American household are 'What's on?' and 'Move over.'" Rouse says. "We listen to the television; we don't listen to each other. The whole idea of Optimum Wellness was positioning a message that spoke to people, that told them there are things they can do, choices they can make around food, lifestyles, values and beliefs that could impact their life more positively."

A worthy goal, but to do that he needed financial backing. He started by talking to some of the bigger organic and natural foods companies, asking if they thought his idea for Optimum Wellness spots on television would work. Amy's Organic Kitchen was first to embrace the idea, and Horizon Organic Dairy and Eldorado Artesian Springs Inc. soon followed.

King Soopers agreed to become the brick-and-mortar partner. Rouse says he wanted to work with the Kroger chain rather than a natural products supermarket because the people he wanted to reach shopped in this kind of grocery stores. If shoppers were going to start trying natural and organic foods, he says, they would be more likely to buy them in a store they were comfortable with, where they knew the aisles and they had a favorite checker.

All parts in place, he began filming his first three months of television spots.

The light-hearted, never preachy, did-you-know messages that covered everything from diet to spiritual well-being and life balance were an instant hit with viewers. The spots also connected sponsors to what Rouse calls a greater message.

"It associates the companies with something that feels good, that consumers listen to, that's educational for them," he says. "It's an association with a way of living. It's not just saying 'buy this.'"

At the end of each message, there's a 15-second trailer that identifies the company sponsor and connects it with the message, for example, "Part of Optimum Wellness is choosing organic. You can find our organic food in the freezer section at King Soopers and City Markets."

"Since [we began filming Optimum Wellness], we've been averaging between five and eight companies every quarter, and we're booked through 2003, with people underwriting the messages," Rouse says. "I think the key in this is if it wasn't helping sales, the companies couldn't sustain it. What we've seen is that it's impacted sales dramatically and now it's growing into other markets."

The benefit for the sponsor, he says, comes from education about the worth of switching products out—and up—to more healthful, and often more costly, organic and natural foods.

What shoppers learn from Optimum Wellness gives them the justification to make organic and natural choices.

"Switching their milk to an organic milk—that's easy enough to do," he says. "It's something that looks the same, it tastes the same, and now they feel good about the choice they've made because they know about the sustainable [value of] organic. Natural foods, health foods, the whole idea behind what this is all about is that it isn't really strange or out of touch. What some companies like Amy's and Cascadian Farms have done so wonderfully well is organic frozen food. They've made food that's really entry level. It's a microwave situation; [shoppers] know how to make that happen. They recognize it—it's not too far out.

"I'm talking to people who don't have two hours to spend in the kitchen. That's not their world. But if they can come home and pull some good organic food out of the freezer, that's an easy place to go."

The sponsored Optimum Wellness messages are now on seven days a week, three times a day in Colorado. And it's moved into another television market, Atlanta, where viewers are reminded to look for fine organic and natural foods at Kroger. If the wellness messages are as successful in Georgia as they have been in Colorado, Rouse says, the spots will be picked up in three more states.

Optimum Wellness has gained depth, too. Because the public service messages were so popular, Rouse asked 9News if he could do an Optimum Wellness segment on the evening news. They agreed to try it—with the caveat that if the first segment didn't work, it would also be the last.

For his news debut he didn't have a teleprompter, but it didn't worry him. He'd never used one shooting his public service messages.

Then the camera light came on. "I got a panicky feeling about what I was going to say. I felt like a deer in the headlights. I just shot from the hip. But when we went to the commercial break, Mark Koebrich, the anchor, said, 'We've got something here.' And he gave me a high five."

In most segments, Rouse says, the premise is simple: State the problem and give the viewers something they can do. Something, he's quick to add, that's easy, accessible and doesn't require a giant leap of faith because it's a little bit too weird.

"In my heart I have an idea about what I want to convey, but to get it to work on television [news] to a person who may have just gotten home from a really lousy day is the challenge," he says. "He just wants to watch the news. He doesn't want to see some really happy physician saying, 'Woohoo, this is going to be great.' So I have to tone down my zeal to make it work for the person who's not in Boulder sitting on an organic sofa. He still wants to learn something that's not in his face, doesn't turn him off and makes sense to him. That's what I'm trying to do."

Consequently, Rouse makes simple suggestions to improve well-being, such as changing food choices to more healthful alternatives, or teaching exercises a viewer doesn't have to be a triathlete to complete (although Rouse is). In one segment he had anchor Kim Christiansen doing yoga.

"She can do yoga dressed in the suit she wears on the news," he says. "That's accessible."

He also prepares foods with specific health benefits that the anchors sample—and everything but the yam muffins has been a hit.

"Wellness on the news is not where people are drawn to hear about the next antibiotic," he says. "It's what [viewers] can do today to impact their lives positively. It's why this segment has been so effective on Channel 9. This is a way to reach another audience."

On Jan. 8, 9News launched another news segment with Rouse. It runs on the Tuesday evening news and is called The Fit Kitchen.

Rouse provides the next level of information on the 9News Web site. An example he gives is the time he talked about blood sugar and diabetes on television. Consumers can then log on to the Web site to learn more about the glycemic index of foods and get recipes.

"If [viewers] saw the thing on diabetes and didn't realize their diet could make a big difference, or if they did, but didn't know what to do, they could log on to 9news.com. They'd find recipes for a week of eating in the life of a diabetic and a list of the natural foods [available] at King Soopers to make these recipes. So it's a real easy way to get the point, learn something, and go to the store and make it happen with a shopping list built for your condition. It keeps it seamless that way."

Links to King Soopers and other sponsoring companies are also on the 9News Web site; sponsors list their products and King Soopers lists organic and natural products on sale.

"The key is coming to the shopper and saying, if you're thinking about healthier food choices, you can find those choices here," Rouse says. What they learn from Optimum Wellness gives them the justification to make organic and natural choices.

"If shoppers are going to be adding to their grocery bill by making organic and natural choices, they need a bigger reason to do it," he says. "And it needs to be something they feel good about doing this week, next week and the week after that."