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25 Years of 1-800-DENTIST Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD, Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine

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by Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD, Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine

For 25 years, 1-800-DENTIST has been the phone number synonymous with finding a dentist. When marketing was still a new concept in dentistry a couple of young guys with a phone number and a dream started to connect patients with dentists in their vicinity. Dentaltown Magazine recently interviewed 1-800-DENTIST's co-founder, Fred Joyal, about the company's history, the challenges of operating in the Internet era and the future of their company. Join us in wishing them a happy 25th anniversary.

How did you make the transition from working in an ad agency to starting a company as unique as
1-800-DENTIST?
Joyal: I was working as a copywriter at an ad agency and a friend of mine who worked in a small start-up business had the foresight five years earlier (around 1980) to get this phone number and he hung onto it. He knew I was working in advertising and he said 'I think you could turn this into a business.' Being young and naive, we took a shot. Another friend of mine, Gary Saint Denis, wanted to leave his job as a stock broker. He was half the reason I left my job. We beat the streets for four months just to find the first 18 dentists in L.A. We put some radio spots on the air and set up a phone room. We got 50 calls the first day. We thought this actually might be something, so we just kept adding dentists and adding cities.

How did you pitch to those first 18 dentists to sign up? Must have been hard to get them to commit to something that was not yet a proven entity.
Joyal: Let's not forget this was 1986. There were plenty of people that thought advertising in dentistry was unethical. The awareness now is that it is a retail health-care profession. We have to compete on that for mind share in advertising. In '78 or '79 professionals were allowed to start advertising beyond the Yellow Pages and society was having trouble adjusting to it. It was hard to persuade people. Plus, you couldn't tell them what was going to happen. We just told them they would get all the referrals from their neighborhoods.

Are any of the original 18 dentists still in practice?
Joyal: One of them was a husband and wife team in Santa Monica that had just come out of Northwestern. I think there are three others who are still members. There is another dentist in the Valley that bought the first dentist on 1-800-DENTIST's practice after about two years and he is still on.

Who are your competitors?
Joyal: It used to be the Yellow Pages and whatever regional promotion was being done. But now it is Google. We try to be the human alternative to it. Google is doing everything automated and we are running a 24/7 call center because we know people want to talk to somebody about the dentist before they talk to the actual dental practice. We are trying to make the first impression; the first initial relationship. That makes us much more powerful than something like Google and we are also screening out a lot of calls. We are trying to be the e-Harmony of dentistry; trying to make a real match.

What are your thoughts on Yellow Pages advertising in 2011? Is it dead?
Joyal: The numbers I have seen are staggering. They lose 20 percent of dentists' business per year. For a lot of people that I know, the Yellow Pages go straight from the front steps into the recycle bin. I've also noticed there are no Yellow Pages in hotel rooms anymore.

Yellow Pages also has an inflexible advertising model. Three months before publication, you have to pick what your ad looks like and you have to run it for an entire year. You can't even change your hours (if you were crazy enough to put them in the ad). We have always tried to be the opposite of that. If it is not working for you, let's change it. We try to have a direct correlation between results and costs.

How have you adapted the Internet into your business model?
Joyal: It is a constant adjustment because Internet behavior changes all the time. Some people won't do anything without first reading reviews about the service. Others just want to get a name and phone number, and still others don't use the Internet at all.

We've recently started putting many of our dentists on Google. Our idea is to make it so the dentists don't have to figure out how to advertise. We are going to figure out how to supply patients in whatever ways are necessary in the advertising world so dentists don't have to decode that new process every year.

Have you noticed a difference in the new patients who use Web search versus the new patients who use the call center?
Joyal: People who use the Internet, especially the younger generation, don't have brand loyalty like their parents did. Brand loyalty is much harder to get right now.

What type of people use the call center? And what are the dental procedures that are most often sought?
Joyal: The people who call can usually be put into one of five categories: The newly moved-in who want to take care of everything soon after moving; the procrastinators who haven't been to the dentist in years; the avoiders who feel discomfort or pain; and finally, the dental emergencies, which branch into two separate categories: critical (must see a dentist within 24 hours) and not critical (lost crown or filling).

One of the domain names you own is Dentistry.com. How does that fit in with your strategy?
Joyal: Its primary purpose is to create a forum for people to read what other people have to say about dental care. Also available on this site is the same list 1-800-DENTIST provides; it's just a different way of approaching patients. We are satisfying their needs for self-education about dentistry first and also peer education. Potential patients want to hear about other people's experiences with procedures and doctors before pursuing treatment. With the Web site, they can read about them.

You recently incorporated Dental Senders into your Patient Activator product. Tell me about what they brought to the table and why it was an attractive acquisition for 1-800-DENTIST.
Joyal: We believe it is time for the practices to get into the digital world. I saw this product and what they had developed with Dental Senders that we have now incorporated into Patient Activator; it gives us a great tool. Currently 26 percent of the population doesn't have a home phone and many people no longer check their message machines. There are people who just text. This is a very efficient way of communicating with people the way they want to be communicated with.

What do you predict for 1-800-DENTIST at your 30th anniversary? What do you want to see that is new and different from where you are today?
Joyal: I would like the consumers to recognize that this is the most trusted resource for finding a dentist. I want to continue to serve dentists who are part of my service with as much patient flow as they want at any given point.

You have been the point person for 1-800-DENTIST since 2004 on the national commercials. Do people bump into you at the supermarket and ask you dental questions?
Joyal: They do. They think I am a dentist.

What is the strangest question you have been asked?
Joyal: It usually involves some procedure that they have had done that didn't go well and they are wondering how I would fix it.

You work at 1-800-DENTIST with your brother, Ron. Some would say working with family can be dangerous. How do you make this dynamic work?
Joyal: My brother and I have always had a very symbiotic relationship. He says I am the brute force and he is the finesse. I think I have acquired some finesse over the years, but nowhere near the degree that he has. He is a great coach to people. He has a tremendous ability to tell people the truth and give them insights into their actions and behaviors. He is a great story teller and is much more conservative and practical, while I'm more of a visionary. It is a very complementary relationship.

Is there something on the horizon for 1-800- DENTIST with smartphones?
Joyal: It is predicted that by 2015 there will be more Web searches done on phones than on computers. So I think that the ever-expanding smartphone capacity is going to make a huge difference. I can see us having Skype-type calls with consumers, so they are looking face-to-face with an operator talking about a dental practice. I make a fraction of the cell calls I used to make. Texting is more convenient than voicemail.

One of your new services is your pay-per-lead program. How is it different from your core 1-800-DENTIST service?
Joyal: For most of the life of the business we charged a flat fee, or two or three tiers of a flat fee for an average number of referrals per year. This works fairly well, but in some areas where there are surges of patients that call and some areas where there just aren't enough dentists or patients, the pay-per-lead program has allowed us to be completely transparent about the transaction. I send a dentist a potential patient and the dentist pays me. He or she is not guaranteed to be a patient because I cannot make him or her come to the office, but I am going to do as good of a match as possible. Between my ability and the dentist's ability to match, we can convert a percentage of those to patients.

How is the price set?
Joyal: It's dependent on two factors: what it costs to advertise in that particular region and what usual and customary fees are in that area. So the price will vary widely from Fargo, North Dakota to San Francisco, California.

If you have 30 seconds with a dentist in an elevator and he is looking for a pearl of wisdom, what would you tell him?
Joyal: My advice would be that he or she needs to genuinely believe and communicate dentistry as one of the best investments people can make in themselves. When dentists do this, they are unstoppable.

Mr. Joyal, thank you for taking the time to speak with Dentaltown Magazine.
Dentaltown Magazine
October 2025
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