Public-health marketing budget cases: a Kansas production cost and a CDC TB evaluation

What to take away

Marketing budgets case studies are useful when the source discloses costs, scope, audience, delivery, measures, and limitations. The two campaigns below operated in public-health settings, not commercial product marketing. Their numbers should not become benchmarks for another organization.

Community Workers Beat the Virus

A published campaign report describes a 2021 Kansas campaign cocreated with community health workers and trusted leaders. It reports $18,330 in production cost, including 317 hours of script, recording, editing, design, and coordination, plus roughly $30,000 for paid traditional and digital media.

The budget lesson is cost completeness. Community participation, creative production, coordination, and monitoring were part of delivery, not free additions to media.

A business adapting the lesson should price research and community or customer participation, record who shaped the plan, and separate production from placement. That split repeats across budgets drawn from other plans. It should not assume the same channels, costs, or response transfer to another market.

Think. Test. Treat TB

The CDC process and outcome evaluation of the March to September 2022 rollout reports 33,166,824 impressions and 54,694 clicks in its process table. Those are channel outputs, not a budget breakdown, so this case supplies delivery and outcome data rather than costs.

The budget lesson is measurement architecture. Delivery metrics show whether purchased media ran and reached people, not whether the intended health outcome followed. Channel costs and outputs need to sit beside audience exposure, downstream actions, study design, statistical uncertainty, and operational context.

A commercial team should define the paid, owned, earned, production, research, and evaluation records before launch. It should preserve denominators, dates, targeting, platform definitions, study methods, and limits before moving money to an apparent channel winner.

What the two cases do not prove

Neither report establishes a universal media split, production ratio, cost per result, or evaluation budget for 2027. Public-health objectives, access, donated support, procurement, and outcome horizons differ from commercial campaigns.

Borrowing a published range is a separate judgement, and it needs the conditions attached to that range in a commercial setting. Use the cases below to improve the budget record and the questions you ask, not to copy their amounts. For the questions to ask first, see marketing budgets questions, and for the full method, see how to set marketing budgets.

For any real case, preserve the approved plan, contract scope, labor assumptions, invoices, media delivery, corrections, customer or audience effects, and the decision made after evaluation. Publish neutral and negative evidence when it changes the conclusion.

Real-campaign evidence comparison

Audit the published evidence

The FTC's advertising substantiation requirement under Section 5 of the FTC Act obliges a reasonable basis before objective advertising claims are disseminated. Apply that U.S. rule to every performance statement in a published budget case. The marketing frameworks case studies meet the same test.

The FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) warn marketers using reviews about fake feedback, selective requests, conditioned incentives, hidden relationships, and paid rankings. Apply them when a case study names providers.

Common questions

Are these real marketing campaign case studies?

Yes. Both sources document named public-health campaigns, methods, delivery, and evaluation.

Can their costs become a 2027 benchmark?

No. Their objectives, markets, periods, procurement, channels, and outcome systems differ from another campaign.

What should a real budget case disclose?

Disclose scope, audience, dates, production and media costs, internal work, delivery, study methods, outcomes, exclusions, uncertainty, and decisions.