Veterinary Emergency Group

How VEG proved media could build awareness & drive visits across local markets

Veterinary Emergency Group (VEG) is a rapidly growing network of emergency animal hospitals across the country. It provides emergency care exclusively, greets and triages customers at the door, and allows people to remain with their pets throughout treatment.

Every market required a different media plan. Each hospital operates within a different mix of competition, audience size, seasonality, media costs, drive-time radius, and hospital capacity.

The ChallengE

VEG faced 2 connected problems.

First: it could not generate demand for emergency pet care. A pet emergency is something that, on average, only occurs three times over the course of a pet’s life. VEG needed to build enough awareness to be remembered and found when that moment came.

Second: its footprint only covered 30% of the country, limiting the efficiency of national media buying. VEG needed a system that could scale across the network without paying to reach large parts of the country where it did not operate.

Investment in brand-building media depended on showing an incremental lift in visits at an acceptable customer acquisition cost. VEG needed to build the brand over time and prove that media was moving the business.

THE INSIGHT

The differences between hospitals also created a way to measure impact.

By identifying the outside factors that caused locations to perform in similar ways, Eden could establish credible control markets and separate those conditions from the effect of media.

As Eden CEO and co-founder Alison Monk described it, VEG operates within “an orchestra of consistently fluctuating market, regional, and seasonal dynamics.” Investment, timing, channel mix, and frequency needed to change by market while every plan worked toward the same brand and business goals.

WHAT CHANGED

A market-by-market plan with measurement at three levels.

To create credible comparisons, Eden worked with VEG’s data team to evaluate more than 20 variables. Three had the strongest relationship to comparable performance:

  • Whether a hospital was suburban or urban

  • How many months it had been open

  • Whether it was entering a new market or opening near an existing VEG hospital

These variables identified three to seven statistically matched benchmarks for each location. Eden compared hospitals receiving media support with untreated hospitals, then combined those findings with marketing mix modeling across 13 markets, brand lift studies, and changes in search behavior.

Eden segmented  markets according to these factors that shaped their media needs, then adjusted investment, timing, channel mix, and frequency by location and season.

The plan led with video across connected TV, YouTube, and streaming audio to communicate VEG’s differentiated experience. Eden maintained reach during lighter periods, then increased frequency and invested in more premium placements during higher-demand seasons, which varied by region.

Eden also built a measurement system that connected three levels of performance:

  1. Channel impact: Marketing mix modeling, incrementality testing, and market benchmarks showed how media contributed to visits and cases.

  2. Brand impact: Overall brand tracking measured the health of the VEG brand, while channel- and tactic-level lift studies showed where changes in awareness were coming from.

  3. Impact on action: Search, branded search, and site visitation showed whether growing awareness was leading people to seek out VEG.

THE RESULTS

Aided Awareness lifts +23%-64% across all eight markets and +5% lift in case volume

The work gave VEG a repeatable model for growing a multi-location brand, with levers that could be adjusted according to market conditions.

It also changed the question VEG could ask of media. Having established that media could drive incremental visits at an acceptable CAC, the organization could begin identifying which channels and tactics worked, why they worked, and where to invest next.