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Meet Dr. Rich O’Neill, the psychologist who touts SUNY Upstate’s services on radio and television
As the public face of SUNY Upstate Medical University, the fact that Dr. Rich O’Neill has glimpsed himself on television once, for only six seconds, is remarkable. The clinical psychologist who introduces viewers to Upstate’s departments and services in a series of slick advertisements rarely watches TV. He’s just too busy.
“I’ve seen the digital versions, which I showed my kids, and they made fun of me,” he says with a chuckle. “I don’t watch much television because I run and I bike and I do nautilus. The only thing I usually watch is sports on ESPN.” But then again, if you don’t watch Time Warner Cable’s broadcasts of Syracuse University men’s basketball games, you’re unlikely to have seen the ads either.
“In fact,” O’Neill says from his Harrison Street office, “I was watching the game last night {Dec. 28} and I saw the ad with Derrick Coleman but I didn’t see me. My kids say, ‘But, Dad, you’re not the same stature as Derrick Coleman.’”
All kidding aside, in the last 10 years, O’Neill has acted, voice-overed and appeared in so many radio and television spots for Upstate that he’s become the de-facto face of the region’s largest employer. “It’s one of those overnight successes that started 30 years ago, well, actually, longer,” says O’Neill, 59, who graduated from Adelphi University in 1975 with a degree in communications/filmmaking and earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from SUNY Buffalo in 1983.
“I worked in a psychology internship here at SUNY Upstate,” he says. “Then, as luck would have it, just as I was leaving, there was a faculty person leaving. I liked this place, and they liked me. And shortly after I got on the faculty I got involved with the Central New York Psychological Association, and Paula Garrell, at that time a reporter for {WSTM} Channel 3, called the association to see if anyone would want to talk about dreams.”
Wanting to do a good job, O’Neill read all the literature he could on the topic. “I was really up to date on dreams,” he says, “and the interview became one of those 10-second soundbites. But it was fun and it was useful and I discovered that reporters always need someone to talk about the psychological aspects of whatever story, and so they started to call me. I’ve probably done 500 television news spots on various things.”
Those spots include in-house ads on Upstate Magazine, a broadcast that airs to the medical center’s employees. “Rich would explain certain psychological concepts very clearly,” says Melanie Rich, Upstate’s director of marketing and university communications. “He became the spokesperson, if you will, for Upstate Magazine, and he was in demand also as a presenter at in-house seminars. It could be a very dry and sensitive subject and Rich was able to translate complex concepts and relate to people on a very personal level. I compare him to Dr. Dean Edell {a Cornell University graduate who hosts a syndicated radio program; it’s good stuff}: He can talk about anything comfortably and it doesn’t make you wince.”
Fast-forward to today, and soundbites have turned into Saturday-morning chats with WSTM’s Laura Hand during the station’s hour-long news show, “Check-up from the Neck-up” segments on Upstate’s HealthLink on Air radio program and 30-second TV ads touting his employer.
There’s O’Neill on the helipad, talking about Upstate’s Level 1 trauma center; O’Neill in a hospital cafeteria, chatting with a patient who had bariatric surgery; O’Neill walking his bike (yes, it’s his bike; more on that later) past the hospital’s emergency room; and O’Neill standing inside the wound care center. Soon to air is a spot showing O’Neill running on the track inside the nearby Institute for Human Performance and then talking about peripheral artery disease, a vascular issue.
While O’Neill is decidedly the star of these spots, he neither writes nor directs them. The second task is up to Melanie Rich and her team; Time Warner provides behind-the-camera expertise. “My staff and I write them,” she notes, “but we go over the copy with Rich. I try to write for his voice, for his presentation style, and he refines each spot further.”
O’Neill’s background in filmmaking helps in another regard, Melanie Rich notes. “Rich is one of the most affable, entertaining professionals I know,” she says. “He’s real and down to earth, and utterly believable. He’s also very comfortable in front of a camera, in front of a mike, in front of an audience. So it was a perfect match for this endeavor. The more I talk to people, the more I see that reflected in their comments; he’s very credible.”
Interestingly, that last point resonates deeply with O’Neill. “Part of my goal,” he says, “is to show that this is science and there’s a lot of wonderful research that’s very useful in our lives. People think psychologists are these goofy people on TV, a strange oddball or kind of a nincompoop. I want to show the public that we’re not all oddballs. I’m interested in destigmatizing psychology and showing how useful psychology is in our everyday lives. That’s my goal. So you’ll notice in my TV commercials I say, ‘I’m psychologist Dr. Rich O’Neill.’”
Weekend Warrior
Nearly every Saturday morning, O’Neill arrives at the WSTM studios, 1030 James St., prepared to go on live with weekend news anchor Laura Hand. Those two-minute chats focus on non-technical health news. Topics have included obesity, how to get healthy, how a teenager’s behavior is molded and influenced.
“Health news you can use, I like to call it,” Hand says. “I let him choose the specific topics, and he brings us research and updates on things he thinks will be of interest to viewers. He sends me a synopsis that I look at, and he always sends me the Internet links; I think it is really important that I can post them on our website.”
While he enjoys presenting the information, O’Neill admits it can be a
challenge to do so in two minutes. “I have really loved developing my
skill at being able to present my issue and then talk about it in a way
that actually gives people some interesting and useful information,” he
says.
Longer segments air during Upstate’s radio show, HealthLink on Air, that broadcasts Sundays from 9 to 10 a.m. on WSYR-AM 570. He remembers his first segment of “Check-up from the Neck-up” from August 2007, which focused on the New York State Fair. “It’s an idea I had had for 30 years,” he says of the “Check-up” segments. “I’ve been doing one a week for almost five years now. Sometimes I do a prepared spot, sometimes we do little interviews on the show. In the next couple of weeks we’ll be talking more about how to make useful New Year’s resolutions, and then what to do when you’ve fallen off the wagon of your New Year’s resolution.”
Because of the success of the radio show, Melanie Rich immediately thought of O’Neill as the person who could be in the TV ads. “We had been using him for radio spots, and it seemed like a natural to move him into television,” she says. “We decided there was no reason to introduce another person. It was just natural that we would extend Rich into the visual realm. Now people see what Rich O’Neill looks like.”
But it’s his voice that sealed the deal. “They seem to like my voice,” he says, “people say they believe what I say. That’s important to me: I never want to say anything I don’t believe.”
Adds Rich: “He’s very comfortable in front of a camera, in front of a microphone, in front of an audience. So he’s a perfect match for us. I try to write the spot for his voice, for his presentation style. We go over the copy, and he always refines it further.” It could be something as simple as the spot running long, or that the location must change.
“We might find that as I read it, it’s two seconds too long so we have to tweak it, and that’s hard because I’ve learned it one way and I’ve got to change it,” he says. “Or one day the construction outside the hospital was too loud so we had to adjust. These take about 2 hours, and we might do 15 or 20 takes, but sometimes it’ll go really quick. I might be walking and trying to say something in particular. It’s been a lot of fun to learn how to do that; you’ll mess up some words and you’ll have to redo the whole thing.”
As much fun as O’Neill admits to having shooting the TV ads, he also notes that they add to his daily workload. As an associate professor at SUNY Upstate, O’Neill teaches the university’s medical students and conducts research; as a clinical psychologist, he sees patients; and as the face of Upstate, he does all this media outreach. His clinical specialty is adults and system-centered therapy.
“I am training business partners to be able to partner better,” he says, “and I do a lot of work with couples, training them to be more effective couple members. I am working with the medical students here, training them on leadership—how to communicate better to be more effective leaders.”
In addition to his professional duties, O’Neill is a dedicated runner; he qualified for the Boston Marathon in 2011 by running a three-hour, 23 minute Wineglass Marathon in Corning. He’s deferring Boston until 2013, however, and intends to work on his speed. “Let’s say I want to get faster,” he says, not wanting to sound boastful. “I still think it might be possible to break three hours.”
In fact, O’Neill runs or bikes to and from work every day the weather cooperates. If it’s too rough outside, he’ll take the bus or his wife will drive him. “I don’t have a parking place anymore,” he says with a grin. He and his wife, Pamela Percival, live just inside the city limits, off East Genesee Street; their two sons, Nicholas and Riley, are 25 and 21, respectively.
And while he’s slowly being recognized in the greater community, O’Neill is no Alec Baldwin in that regard. “I haven’t gotten too much response at Wegmans,” he says, “but I’ve gotten response here at Upstate. I got my first perk the other day. I was wearing my bike stuff and coming out of the one of the buildings, and somebody stops and looks at me and holds the door for me, and I say, ‘Oh, thank you very much.’ And he says, ‘Anything for a TV star.’ I’ve known this guy for, like, 30 years. Or occasionally somebody will recognize me and they won’t talk to me but they’ll look at me with this strange look, and I’ll realize they have probably seen me on TV.”
Still, he’s happy to be so busy he’s barely seen himself on the tube. “I would never stop doing those TV ads; I love doing it,” he says. “They’re really fun. I also love doing my ‘Check-up from the Neck-up’ segments. It broadens the potential impact for psychology. As long as they’re interested, I’ll keep doing it.”
So far, so good, on that score, according to Melanie Rich. “I would love to provide this concept to other hospitals, academic medical centers,” she says. “I see Rich O’Neill as definitely a local dean: smart without being pompous. He’s not intimidating, he’s very engaging and people are super-comfortable with him.”
