If you’re a commuter or vacationer on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, you may have seen the Pulmonary Hypertension Association (PHA) Awareness Campaign Ads that went up this week.
Some focus on PHA’s Heart2CurePH concept. Along with a food lover’s heart; a book lover’s heart and a lover’s heart, the ads display an echocardiogram image of the heart of a PH patient along with the words, “Pulmonary Hypertension puts unbearable stress on the heart. We’re putting our heart into finding a cure.” The ads provide a brief explanation of what PH is — that it’s often misdiagnosed, as asthma, for example, and can lead to death from right heart failure – and sends passengers to PHAssociation.org for more information.
Other ads feature PHA celebrity champion and national recording artist Traci Braxton. Braxton, who stars alongside her family on the hit WE tv reality show, Braxton Family Values, appears in these ads along with the quote, “Two of my sisters have diseases associated with pulmonary hypertension.” Braxton’s sister, Grammy Award winning artist Toni Braxton, has lupus. Another sister, national recording artist Tamar Braxton-Herbert, has battled blood clots in the lungs. Researchers find up to nine percent of lupus patients also have PH. One form of PH, Chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH), is believed to occur in up to four percent of patients who have suffered a blood clot.
In addition to the Amtrak ads, PHA Heart2CurePH TV PSAs will appear on monitors on American Airlines in-flight video screens and in targeted social media ads. The outreach is an extension of PHA’s Heart2CurePH campaign, the first coast-to-coast national multimedia PH PSA campaign, launched in November 2015. The ads continue to appear in donated national media, including urban public transit spaces, major print publications, professional sports programs and on local and national TV and radio stations.
Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains run up and down the routes each day, providing continuous exposure to a captive audience in four large markets: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC; as well as Baltimore, Wilmington, Newark, New Haven and Providence, and smaller markets in between. The Heart2CurePH in-flight PSAs will reach more than 950,000 people in August and October on nearly 800 total American Airlines’ Dallas-Fort Worth, New York (JFK & LGA), Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Phoenix and Washington DC flights.
