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Brand Campaign · Unity Health

A brand campaign for Unity Health, built on a simple truth: you can't have community without unity.

Logo Design Campaign Direction Art Direction Copywriting Brand Standards
2019
Campaign Launch
In-House
Chosen Over an Agency
Region-Wide
Ad Series Rollout
Together We Are CommUnity ad, Dr. Katherine Durham, Unity Health cardiologist, at home with her daughter
Together We Are CommUnity ad, Toy Goodwin, knee replacement patient and gardener

Background & Objective

A campaign that feels like the region it serves

Unity Health wanted a brand campaign that felt like the region it serves. Its main focus was the physicians who care for the community, but it deliberately brought in patients too, because everyone in the Unity Health network, from doctor to patient, is also just a neighbor. That shared identity is what makes the care personal.

We are volunteers, neighbors, patients, caregivers and teammates. We are doctors, coaches, teachers and friends. Unity Health helps shape the close-knit neighborhoods we live in, as well as the vast network of care across the region. CommUnity doesn't happen alone, it happens by being together.

Role & Contributions

Owned the creative, end to end

Identity
Logo & Messaging
Developed the CommUnity logo and set the messaging direction for the whole campaign.
Production
Art Direction
Art directed and produced every ad in the series: photography, layout, and copy.
Governance
Brand Standards
Wrote the standards that governed how the campaign was used across the marketing team.

Key Decisions & Creative Rationale

You can't have community without unity

The core idea is made literal in the wordmark itself, "Unity" pulled out in weight and color inside "CommUnity."

To make the "we're the same community" idea land, nobody is shot in a white coat or an exam room. Every hero image shows someone in their actual life. The focus is the physicians who serve the community, but patients get the identical visual and verbal treatment on purpose, because that sameness is the whole point of the campaign.

CommUnity logo exploration, lettering studies with 'Unity' emphasized

The Series

Same treatment, on purpose

Each person is billed by who they are before what they are to Unity Health: Gardener, then Knee Replacement Patient, then Grandmother, then Beebe Resident. The series centers on the physicians who care for the community, and frames its patients exactly the same way, because they belong to it too.

CommUnity ad, Dr. Katherine Durham, Mother / Unity Health Cardiologist / Baker / Searcy Resident
CommUnity ad, Dr. Jason Smith, Father / Podiatrist / Golfer / Newport Resident
CommUnity ad, Toy Goodwin, Gardener / Knee Replacement Patient / Grandmother / Beebe Resident
CommUnity ad, Dr. Virgincita Fuentes, Mother / Family Practice Physician / Outdoors Admirer / Newport Resident
CommUnity banner ad, Sharon Stringfellow, Cancer Survivor

Campaign Spot

The :30 spot

The same idea in motion, neighbors who happen to be the people caring for you.

Process

From a format to a system

The hero-image-with-type-over-it format was the starting direction. From there: rounds of review with the marketing coordinators and the marketing leader, then formal brand standards: typography, image treatment, and a layout system.

With the standards in place, the broader team could keep producing consistent ads without design review on every single piece, from portrait ads to banners to merch.

CommUnity campaign t-shirt
The Challenge

Leadership was ready to send the campaign to a local agency to execute. Before that was final, the logo and a handful of mock ads were built and presented as an alternative, and the marketing leader chose that direction instead.

Outcome & Impact

A marketing line that became literally true

The campaign launched at the end of 2019. When COVID hit the following year, its entire premise, that Unity Health's physicians are literally your neighbors, stopped being a marketing line and became visibly true to the whole community in real time, as those same physicians were on the front lines caring for the people around them.