Ad Age is marking Black History Month 2023 with our third-annual Honoring Black Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, JinJa Birkenbeuel—our third guest editor of the month—offers her thoughts on the making of the “We Got You” campaign for Advocate Health. Birkenbeuel is CEO of Birk Creative, host of “The Honest Field Guide” podcast and songwriter for soft country rock band Utah Carol. (Visit our Honoring Creative Excellence hub each weekday for a new essay from another notable Black creative.)

At my firm Birk Creative, we were invited to partner with Illinois-based Advocate Health to create a billboard campaign designed to educate people from historically ignored communities on how and why to get the COVID-19 vaccine and also how to stay home and receive care virtually.

Although my firm had created health-related brand and educational campaigns in the past for other clients, this one was different. During the pandemic that started in 2020, and continues today, the goals of this assignment are a matter of life and death for millions of Americans, including me. I’ve always quietly understood that what ad and design agencies like mine create is fundamentally ephemera, landfill-worthy and highly extractive. This assignment was an opportunity to commit myself and the full creativity of my agency team to contribute and participate in real-time outcomes that would have a no-waste, direct impact that could save American lives.

The assignment started off with a clear directive from Advocate Health: We need billboards designed and placed immediately with a message that asks people to get vaccinated. 

My first question to start was what are the specific demographics of our intended audience, and what about people from Spanish-speaking communities? Where do they live, and should we even run billboards at all? What does the community believe about vaccines?

During my research and discovery, I communicated with the team that Black and Brown communities are still suffering from business disinvestment and the 2008 financial collapse, and combined with a lack of local resources including grocery stores, hospitals and rail transit, they would require a more intimate outreach approach. The solution would need to be more than creating a billboard.

As a trusted and resourced leader in the field, I was given a blank slate to transform the billboard assignment into a change-management and DEI solution for Advocate, and a multifaceted cultural impact campaign for the community.

Powered by my agency’s creativity, insights and lived experience with multicultural advertising and design, we wrote, tested and launched a three-part campaign theme, “We Got You” (in Spanish, “Estamos Contigo”), “I Got Mine,” and “Go Get Yours,” which engendered trust, confidence and a call to action. We created multicultural original emoji characters that were designed to appeal to a wide audience and placed our emoji concept on billboards in the neighborhoods, as well as on bus transit.

Additionally, we wrote an original theme song for a TV spot in both English and Spanish, and ran ads on popular local radio stations and earned mentions on the local news. We provided grassroots strategies for local community conversations and activations that included texting and church sponsorships—and we even designed and wrote a COVID-19 children’s book for Advocate Health’s pediatric division.

We designed and launched Advocate's first-ever direct mail campaign, and we established their programmatic advertising that included static ads and animated videos for platforms including Spotify, Hulu, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. All of our materials were intentionally designed with culturally relevant Spanish equivalents. Finally, we planned and rolled out powerful Google ad campaigns that included text ads, video and display ads.

I was exceptionally proud to have been recognized for my Advocate Health “We Got You (Estamos Contigo)” campaign work by Fast Company as well as by Graphic Design USA. Proof that my agency’s public health work for Advocate stood out as excellent in a sea of COVID-advertising sameness.

Proof of our innovation resulted in being able to reach and activate the required number of people Advocate needed to sign up for at-home care in eight months. Our local listening and demographic research in Advocate’s urban communities shifted its approach to local neighborhood outreach. Our processes and shared ideas continue to benefit the communities that Advocate partners with today and help them validate, identify and fill gaps in their rural communities as well.

Projects like this bring together everything we love about our work: an important purpose, a sense of community and a chance to use our full arsenal of tools and talents. Although my team and the client team were in survival mode during the assignment, we locked in, got the job done—and very well—and since have developed a sustaining go-to creative relationship. Working with Advocate Health on a public health initiative kept me connected, learning and compassionate during a time when death surrounded us, including immediate members of both of our teams that succumbed to COVID-19. I stayed grateful and grounded, and the client shared with me that they were too. 

The assignment manifested a new work mantra for me: Look for, find and work with the helpers, and be a helper too. Work with empathetic people and brands contributing something positive to people and the world. Trusting me and my ideas and being fearless about innovation and outcomes—we will be at our best, and we’re all in!