Home / The Work / WA Dept. of Veterans Affairs
Case study · Public sector · Flight complete — Jul 27 to Aug 27, 2026
It's More
Than a Job.
Washington State runs four Veterans Homes — Port Orchard, Orting, Spokane and Walla Walla — and needs nurses in all of them. Competing against hospital signing bonuses meant selling something a hospital can't offer.
Video completion rate across the full flight
Impressions delivered, all inside the six target counties
Streaming publishers carried the spot
Average views per clinical job posting during the flight
The spot
The :60 that ran
across 31 publishers.
Produced on location at the Washington Veterans Home in Port Orchard, cut to :60 for connected TV, and delivered with an on-screen apply path in every frame. This is the aired version.
“It’s More Than a Job” · Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs · :60 connected TV
The brief
Recruit nurses
without a
signing bonus.
A private hospital can outbid a state agency on salary almost every time. What it can't offer is a nurse-to-resident ratio that lets you actually know the people you care for, a career pathway the state pays for, and the specific meaning of caring for veterans.
So the campaign didn't argue about money. It put real WDVA nurses on camera and let them finish the sentence: “This is more than a job because…”
What we did
Produced it,
then bought it.
On-location production
Filmed at the Washington Veterans Home in Port Orchard, with a drone operator brought in to elevate the exteriors.
A 33-question interview guide
Built specifically to pull usable soundbites — complete-sentence answers, direct-to-camera CTAs, and the pathway story.
Compliance-aware capture
Run against the WDVA Stylebook and Policy 160.100: signed consents on file, all footage screened for protected health information.
:60 spot & six testimonials
A :60 commercial for connected TV, plus six individual video testimonials cut for the campaign landing pages and WDVA social.
Connected TV media buy
Delivered across 31 streaming publishers and 70+ content genres — documentary, news, drama, crime, history.
County-level targeting
Focused on the counties immediately surrounding the Port Orchard Veterans Home, so working CNAs nearby could take advantage of the LPN pathway partnership with Olympic College.
Weekly platform reporting
Delivery, completion and inventory quality reported every week, with underperformers named and suppressed.
Web deliverables
Six testimonials,
cut for the
landing page.
The :60 buys the attention. It can’t answer the question a nurse actually has, which is what the day is like and whether the pathway is real. So the same shoot produced six standalone testimonials as separate web deliverables — sized 9:16, captioned for silent autoplay, and handed over for the campaign landing pages and WDVA’s own social channels.
One interview guide, one location day, two distinct deliverable sets. That is the difference between buying a commercial and buying a campaign.
Two of the six. Filmed at the Washington Veterans Home in Port Orchard under WDVA Policy 160.100 — signed consents on file, every frame screened for protected health information.
Where it served
Top five publishers
carry four-fifths
of delivery.
All five finished above 96% completion. That is efficient, high-quality inventory — not remnant.
| Publisher | Impressions | Completion rate |
|---|---|---|
| Samsung TV Plus | 11,392 | 98.70% |
| Paramount | 9,623 | 98.43% |
| LG Channels | 9,455 | 97.81% |
| A&E | 5,904 | 98.00% |
| Sinclair Broadcasting | 5,507 | 96.85% |
| Roku | 2,588 | 95.74% |
| FOX | 1,648 | 94.69% |
| TCL | 1,488 | 97.91% |
| AMC | 1,145 | 98.95% |
| Plex | 1,047 | 91.59% |
| 21 further publishers | 2,905 | — |
| All 31 publishers | 52,702 | 97.47% |
One publisher was cut mid-flight: Warner Bros. Discovery was completing at 71.93% while everything else ran above 94%, so it was suppressed on August 17 and its budget moved to inventory already performing. Weekly completion hit its campaign high of 98.07% the following week. Publisher impressions sum exactly to the 52,702 campaign total — every impression is attributed to a named publisher, nothing sits in an unallocated bucket.
Where it landed
Every impression
inside the six
target counties.
Nothing delivered outside the region. The four counties closest to the Port Orchard Veterans Home took 34,848 of the 52,702 impressions — 66.1% of delivery. Kitsap, the county the facility sits in, finished with the highest completion rate of any county on the buy.
| County | Impressions | Share | Completion rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pierce | 18,590 | 35.3% | 97.14% |
| King | 14,813 | 28.1% | 97.61% |
| Kitsap | 8,077 | 15.3% | 98.13% |
| Thurston | 5,940 | 11.3% | 97.90% |
| Lewis | 3,041 | 5.8% | 96.13% |
| Mason | 2,241 | 4.3% | 97.44% |
| Total | 52,702 | 100% | 97.46% |
The platform reports by zip code, not by county. We pulled the full zip-level export and rolled it up to county ourselves — every zip mapped cleanly, so these are exact counts rather than estimates.
What happened downstream
Views per job
posting more
than tripled.
The agency’s HR office pulled its own job-posting numbers for the flight window and the month immediately before it. Average views per clinical posting went from 728 to 2,491. Applications per posting went from 5 to 11 — on a third fewer postings.
The nursing assistant roles, the hardest to fill and the reason the campaign existed, moved furthest: 23 applications per posting, up from 9.
| All clinical postings (RN, LPN, NAC) | Before Jun 26 – Jul 26 | During flight Jul 27 – Aug 27 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jobs posted | 9 | 6 | −33% |
| Average views per job | 728 | 2,491 | +242% |
| Total posting views | 6,552 | 14,946 | +128% |
| Applications received | 49 | 63 | +29% |
| Applications per job | 5 | 11 | +120% |
What this is, and what it isn’t. Views per posting can rise simply because fewer jobs were posted. That is not what happened here — total views across all clinical postings more than doubled while postings fell by a third, so more people looked in absolute terms. But this is a correlation across adjacent windows, not attribution. Connected TV ads are not clickable, so no impression can be tied to a specific application, the application counts are small, and ordinary seasonality cannot be ruled out. Conversion rate also fell, from 0.70% to 0.40%, which is what awareness advertising does when it reaches people who were not already job-hunting. We would rather publish the number with its limits attached than round it into something it isn’t. Posting data supplied by the WDVA Office of Human Resources.
Start here
Have a recruitment or public-information mandate?
Compliance stylebooks, consent requirements, procurement, and a number you're accountable for. We've worked inside all four. Fifteen minutes, no obligation.
Rather skip the form? contact@asparkcreative.com