Germs (and ads) are everywhere in One Medical's first brand campaign

San Francisco-headquartered healthcare company One Medical goes just about everywhere to remind Americans that germs are just about everywhere in its first brand campaign, “Sick Cities.”

The effort, created out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, follows the appointment in May of the company’s first CMO, Doug Sweeny, a vet of Google’s Nest and Levi’s. Following in the footsteps of  advertisers like Spotify, Lyft and Google, it consists of more than 130 contextual ads that playfully speak to the specific locations in which they are running.

A giant digital billboard in NYC reads, “This play is crawling with more than tourists,” a sight-seeing bus wrap in Hollywood displays, “These people are seeing stars. Hopefully you’re not,” while a mobile ad that runs when users are at the airport says, “Lots of airborne things here. Not all of them planes.”

One Medical is a primary care, membership-based company that works with more than 1,000 employers, many of them in the tech and creative space such as Uber, J Crew, G.E. and Soul Cycle. The company began working with Goodby earlier this summer and landed on a positioning called "Real Life Care," says Sweeny. "We have reinvented the patient experience and we deliver exceptional care that fits into people's lives--not the other way around. One of the first questions was 'How do we turn this into a campaign idea?'"

“One Medical is a community-centric organization and their offices are located in neighborhoods rather than just out in some hard-to-reach hospital,” says GS&P Creative Director Tristan Graham. “So for us it just made sense to show people, in a small way, that we recognize the individual challenges facing them in their locations and to let them know when we have an office around the corner they could be visiting.”

The campaign is Goodby’s first work for the brand and drops as One Medical is in the midst of expansion. It currently has more than 70 offices in eight markets: San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Phoenix, Seattle and Washington, D.C. and is set to open in San Diego, with plans to double its number of locations in the next few years.

According to GS&P Creative Director Felipe Lima, “Not many people know about the brand” so “our brief was to create mass awareness with a simple, single-minded campaign that celebrates the convenience of One Medical.”

As for the decision to go with outdoor advertising, "reaching consumers is so hard today given how engage with media," says Sweeny. "Out of home is DVR-proof. It's a great medium when used contextually with the right message. And One Medical is in neighborhoods, a part of these communities. It makes sense given where we live."

Along with the new campaign One Medical has a new brand identity system, created out of San Francisco design firm Moniker.

The work debuts just as the current healthcare open enrollment period has begun and others in the space have stepped out with their own marketing campaigns--including Minneapolis-headquartered insurer Bright Health and local urgent care provider CityMD.

Yet while some marketers are bringing more creativity into the category, "there is a sea of sameness that has not changed in a long time," Sweeny says. "Smiling kids, 50-somethings sailing, millennials on road trips. When we communicate in an authentic way that delivers on our promise, we will continue to stand out."