Bupa is known to many worldwide as a health insurer, and the insurance sector is often homogenised with a negative perception. But as a leading global healthcare brand, Bupa has a much bigger purpose to help people live longer, healthier, happier lives and make a better world.
So, in a year that the world’s attention was turning to an epic ‘summer of sport’ anchored by Paris 2024, Bupa saw an opportunity to cut-through with its first-ever global brand campaign - designed to challenge people’s perception of both the brand, and how people view health.
With a broad target audience spanning ABC1 consumers aged 18-70, employees and healthcare partners, we needed to develop a global campaign that could unite and engage across different segments.
Campaign SMART Objectives
Whilst many other brands were announcing multi-million sponsorship deals for the Paris Olympics, Bupa’s much more modest budget meant we had to think creatively about how we could show up in this cultural moment. We decided to turn the budget-limiting constraints into the campaign’s greatest strength. Why hijack the Olympics, when you’ve got a much richer health story canvas happening just a few weeks later? As the Official Healthcare Partner of the National Paralympic Associations in Bupa’s key markets we engaged with local teams to identify athletes to be part of Bupa Picture of Health, ensuring they were chosen for their range of athletic disciplines, gender, race, ethnicity and age.
With our diverse team of athletes in place, the leading insight for the campaign was born: that health is unique and individual to everyone, and isn’t one-size-fits-all.
However, when it comes to the portrayal of what ‘fit’ or ‘healthy’ look like in the wider world, there is a significant lack of diversity or consideration for what really constitutes health, in all its forms (physical, mental, emotional). Health is often presented as simply being sick or well. And so, the campaign strategy was set – through our Paralympics partnership, we would inspire people to think about what health means to them, spark conversations around the world, and position Bupa as a brand that ‘gets’ health.
We partnered with Annie Leibovitz – famed for her iconic and globally recognised celebrity portraits – using her unparalleled vision to capture a striking collection of photos, featuring our six Para athletes as subjects, with each portrait reflecting a unique take on health to the individual – from 'self-belief' and 'independence’ to ‘energy’ and ‘tranquillity’.
Shot against the backdrop of Paris, home of the 2024 Games, each portrait was meticulously crafted. The series demonstrated that what constitutes ‘health’ is not one-size fits all, inspiring us all to question pre-conceived notions of what health ‘looks’ like.
The photo series launched a public movement, inviting everyone to share their own ‘Picture of Health’ in our online gallery for a chance to win tickets to the Paralympic Games.
Earned media storytelling was core to everything we did – this was an earned-first campaign. We invited Men’s Health, a gold tier media target for Bupa, to the photoshoot in Paris to interview the Para athletes which resulted in two features across print, online and social plus a podcast. We devised a robust, global media strategy and toolkit to aid each of the markets in amplifying the story locally. Influencer marketing further amplified the campaign with nine creators chosen from the athlete’s markets, each creating content around their own Picture of Health.
On campaign launch day we revealed a striking open-air gallery on London’s South Bank displaying the athlete’s portraits on large-scale plinths, each telling the story behind their personal meaning of health.
We invited two UK-based athletes down to the gallery for a press photoshoot and set up several broadcast interviews with them, including Sky Sports News.
The Picture of Health global campaign results far exceeded expectations, in both scale and impact across its four objectives:
1: Raise Bupa’s global profile as a healthcare brand (Awareness)
2: Engage people in changing holistic health perceptions through imagery (Engagement)
The campaign engagement was incredibly successful, achieving:
3: Improve brand perception for Bupa (Positive sentiment)
4: Be the dominant health insurance brand in earned media during the 2024 Paralympics (Share of voice)
