Lisa Boosin

Health Nucleus

Disclaimer: You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, I’ve only got one image so I need to write a thousand words to explain what it is, and where the rest of the images are.

Health Nucleus is the flagship offering from Human Longevity. It’s the most comprehensive assessment of your health and genetic composition anywhere: for $25,000, you receive a clinical-quality genomic sequencing and report, a full body and brain MRI scan, and a host of other advanced tests. And HLI was very much in startup mode: instead of developing a brand and gradually rolling a campaign out, everything was happening at once, at 1,000 miles per hour.

We knew we had to make Health Nucleus a big thing – not just an innovative new product, but a whole new category. Whatever we did for it had to convey how advanced and exclusive the offering was, but it still needed to appear warm and compassionate – but also appealing to the multi-multi-millionaires who were the most likely clients.

Our first step was arriving at a concept (which we developed in tandem with the parent company): the “Layers of Me” campaign’s big hallmark is a bold two-part headline. In conceiving this, I wanted to set up a dichotomy: the part on the right gets at the health status quo, or what we expect from traditional care. The part on the left is the proactive future that Health Nucleus empowers. (The headlines that resonated the strongest with not only the client but in market research among both consumers and HCPs: I have breast cancer/that I may never get, and Alzheimer's runs in my family/not in my future.) The headline is superimposed over a strong image of a striking individual, and that photo is layered on top of a background photo that is meant to convey the complexity of their lives –it’s analogous to the different levels of “you” revealed by Health Nucleus.

For the image library, we originally intended to put out a casting call, via social media, looking for real people who had an interest or a need for this kind of testing, and then we would use their images in our materials, but also leverage their stories, for content and other social media posts (among other things, we were going to create sliders, utilizing that two-part concept). Because of timing, we put the idea on hold and went with stock images.

Other tactics in this campaign included:

• videos
• radio spots
• outdoor boards (see below)
• convention signage
• a smaller, more abstract and artistic “health nucleus” booth that was used at gatherings and events where Craig Venter spoke (see below)

We also created the customer journey elements, including:

• email blasts
• sales scripts
• videos
• landing pages

And of course, the central piece was a website, with a similar degree of functionality as the HLI website. (The placeholder currently at HealthNucleus.com was not created by my agency.)

 Our innovation wasn’t just limited to the work, but in figuring out how to reach an elite audience of millionaires, who, not only prefer to not be marketed to, might also be reticent to do something that revealed their most important data.

This was, without a doubt, one of the most exciting and rewarding brands I’ve ever worked on. But for a variety of reasons, the work, much of it either completed or in the final stages of completion, was put on hold. And by the time I left the agency, there was no forward motion on any of the work.

I spent about nine months of my life on this—and yes, I am definitely the type of person who gets attached to my work, so I’m really sad that I didn’t get to see if come to fruition. I hope that, at some point, the company will make use of all of the intelligent and original ideas my agency had in bringing their brand to life.