May 6, 2024

Mental Health Awareness Deserves Year-Round Priority

Author: Andrew Gall

Premera Blue Cross believes mental health support deserves more than just a month—and from Kraken partnerships to social campaigns, we’ve worked on several distinct campaigns with the brand over the past three years promoting mental health awareness.

With Mental Health Awareness Month underway, our latest mental health support campaign for Premera looks inward in the form of Zoom backgrounds, offering Premera employees a choice of backgrounds in the name of mental health support. This year, Premera felt it was especially important to create an internal initiative, given both the hybrid culture of the company and the escalation of both stress and burnout at offices nationwide. The background design turns the familiar trope of job titles into messages of mental health support, while additional messaging encourages employees to “reach out and emoji someone.” A paid social campaign featuring similar messaging is also breaking this month.

Together with Premera, we’ve built a robust history of compelling work in the mental health category. Most notably: recent “emotional B2B work” that showcased coworkers going the extra mile to care for one another (which was recently shortlisted by the internationally-acclaimed New York Festivals.

Partnership work with the Seattle Kraken has included a compelling TV spot in which a hockey player signals his need for support by carving HELP into the ice, docu-style videos featuring conversations amongst Kraken players sharing their mental health struggles, and a social media campaign encouraging those suffering to take the first step and seek help. That particular campaign won a Clio amongst work for global clients like Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch, among others.

In addition to our client partnership with Premera that has held strong through multiple decades, our robust healthcare experience has spanned from Seattle Children’s to Overlake Medical Center, among others. And as mental health has continued to become an increasingly large part of the overall healthcare space, we’ve been proud to use our storytelling skills to help amplify its importance.