Health insurance often conjures up thoughts of illness or injury. Which is why most people tend to avoid the topic altogether. Moreover, insurance is notorious for its complexity and providers are perceived as being more interested in their own wellbeing than their customers’. No wonder health insurance is one of the most disliked industries in America – second only to telecommunications.

This is the landscape Cigna found itself in when our effort began in 2015.

Cigna, therefore, had to create distance between itself and the rest of the category. We did this by identifying a meaningful role for the brand. One that set Cigna apart from the health insurance industry. And provided a “north star” for all of our brand’s behaviors.

Cigna’s meaningful brand role is to earn the right to be a partner in wellness to all. (Instead of the company that wants your call when you are sick.) We knew we had to loudly, proudly prove our commitment to wellness to an audience that is prone to ignoring insurance providers.

“Open Enrollment” is American health insurance’s busy season. It is the time period when the majority of Americans choose their health insurance for the following year.

This Open Enrollment period, we decided to do something bold. Something that no other provider had done before. Instead of spending our media budget boasting about ourselves, our plans, or our innovations (like every other health insurance provider does), we put our marketing budget to work in an effort to make more Americans more well.

So where did we begin? We knew from a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that Americans seek preventive care at the half the recommended rate. And that up to 100,000 lives could be saved every year if everyone actually went to the doctor for an annual checkup.

This statistic is the underlying cause of a national epidemic, and when we found it we knew that Cigna had found its mission:

Preventive care.

So we knew that 100,000 lives could be saved if people just went to their doctor for an annual check-up. But how do you do that in a way that isn’t scary and doesn’t cause people to shut down or tune you out?

We wrapped a serious life-saving message inside an idea with a stethoscope and a smile. We created the TV Doctors of America.

With the TV Doctors of America, we brought together five of America’s most loved characters from five of its most popular television series to capture people’s attention and motivate them to finally take control of their health, simply by going for their annual check-up.

Our campaign broke through the drab, conventional chatter of health insurance messaging while drawing pop culture attention to Cigna. More importantly, it saved real lives. We engaged millions with our message and drove tens of thousands of Americans to take a life-saving action they've ignored for years, all while showing consumers Cigna is different from the rest.