Unless you were offline the past few days, it’s been hard to miss mentions of the (admittedly cute) VW SuperBowl ad that features a young boy playing Darth Vader, complete with the ever-impressive Star Wars soundtrack. Certainly in my circles, it has been tweeted, facebooked, blogged, and shared in pretty much any other way…

It turns out that there is another great part to the story… by way of Luke Armour (on Facebook), I learned that the child actor, Max Page, was a patient at the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital where he received a pacemaker at 4 months of age.

It’s cool to see this story behind the story… and the L.A. Children’s Hospital certainly gets kudos on a several points:

• Just getting this story out there as a blog post for people to find and share;
• Nicely mixing in pictures and video into their post;
• Posting the photos up to Flickr as well as the blog post;
• Imprinting/watermarking the images with their logo for all the people, like me, who will use those images in posts like this one.

Sure, it’s a textbook case of riding on a wave of viral publicity to promote your organization (L.A. Children’s Hospital) and cause (children who suffer from heart conditions)… but… DUH!… that’s what the communications team for an organization should be doing!

Well done, L.A. Children’s Hospital! Thanks for giving us a bit more of the story behind the story. (And kudos to Max Page, too, for his well done role in the ad.)

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