Advertising isn’t just about motivating people to buy our products or competing with each other for more awards. Our creative problem solving skills can be used to change the world.

Our President wanted to kill ACA and did everything he could to see the program fail. When we heard the budget for advertising had been slashed, making it nearly impossible for people to know when and where to sign up for healthcare, we sprung into action.

We felt that we had been given a unique opportunity to create real change in people’s lives, and we took it. We put a call out to our friends at other advertising agencies, media companies, design firms, social media experts, anyone who would take this challenge on with us. Of course, nearly everyone said yes and soon we had an agency of our own whose sole purpose was to get people affordable healthcare coverage.

The goal was simple: Tell people they were eligible for affordable healthcare and make up for the 90% budget cuts set forth by our President.

First, we reached out to our friends and partners who possessed a unique skill set that allowed us to make difficult information easily digestible. We had to communicate clearly and efficiently and on a large scale. Healthcare is a complicated-enough issue, even without the hiccups of budget cuts.

The brief was straightforward: create content letting people know about the enrollment period, where to enroll, and make this very daunting process seem significantly less overwhelming. At the same time we were reaching out to our partners to join the Coverage Coalition, we were also generating work on our own – social posts, TV spots, radio ads, and OOH. Soon, our media partners helped us find stages to promote our creative, pushing enrollment numbers to record-breaking highs.

Agencies, design shops, and production companies created content to spread the word. Media companies donated space across national TV, digital, radio, out-of-home and even Times Square and our Facebook Messenger chatbot helped users navigate the sign-up process. We partnered with insurance professionals who helped us make sure we were targeting the exact right people at the exact right time.

The Coverage Coalition reached over 100 million people in the month and half campaign period. But the good news didn’t stop there. In the first week, enrollments were up 179% over 2016. The second week, enrollment was up 60%. In fact, every week of open enrollment was up over previous years.

The one thing Trump didn’t want to happen... did. Partly because the marketing industry saw the power we possess as a collective and stood up together to say to the President, 'If you're not going to tell America, we will.”

We always joke about how we’re “not saving lives” with advertising. This time, we had the opportunity to do exactly that.

The President of the United States sought to destroy the ACA, leaving millions of American families without affordable healthcare coverage.

This idea wasn’t about selling our brand of toilet paper or making money, this was about doing the right thing. This was about getting the entire advertising & media world to come together to create real positive change. We came together with one goal: get as many Americans universal health care as possible with advertising as our tool.

With basically no time or money, we needed to focus our efforts in order to be as impactful as possible. We scoured through countless datasets – cross-referencing and correlating data to identify insights and opportunities.

Data helped us identify target audiences based on key demographics such as location, age, race, and ethnicity. This ensured we would reach those who were most in-need and at-risk. Using past enrollment data, we identified sign-up trends by week, day, and even time of day to ensure that we were reaching the right people, with the right message, at the right time.

Next, we prioritized key markets – like Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. To organize these markets into priority tiers, we dug into ACA enrollment data from previous years, current rates of uninsured, and at-risk populations, making variations of our TV, Social posts, and radio ads to speak directly to those in need.

The Trump administration slashed the advertising budget for the Affordable Care Act by 90% and cut the enrollment period in half versus previous years. As a result, fewer people were going to know about their government funded healthcare options, and because of this, fewer people were likely to enroll.

In response, we formed the Coverage Coalition, a non-partisan consortium of concerned citizens, made up of various advertising agencies, media companies, insurance professionals and everyday people, to make up for the 90% budget cut. We would get the word out about the different healthcare options and help people enroll themselves and their family members.