What’s your go-to approach for your mental health?
Do you like to get out and move, like the Dynamic Defender? Or do you like to connect with friends, like the Trusty Teammate? In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, in May of 2024, Reingold teamed up with NBA Mind Health to highlight six simple steps that people could take to prioritize and enhance their mental wellness.
The theme of the public-facing campaign was: Join the Mind Health Squad. And the campaign site centered on an interactive quiz that visitors could take to identify their go-to mind health style – be it move, play, pause, learn, connect, or nourish. To further engage the NBA audience, visitors were then assigned a corresponding persona, such as the Centered Center (for “pause”) or the Playful Point Guard (for “play”).
Our overarching goal was to show the general public that there are simple steps that they can take in their everyday lives to prioritize and enhance their mental wellness.
To achieve this, we knew we had to grab the attention of audiences that were connected in some way to the NBA – for example, audiences who follow NBA social channels, or audiences who might be watching an NBA playoff game.
We believed the Mind Health Squad would be an engaging, basketball-connected way of presenting these six simple steps – and so we created a persona for each step (the Dynamic Defender for “move,” the Playful Point Guard for “play,” the Centered Center for “pause,” the Clever Coach for “learn,” the Trusty Teammate for “connect,” and the Fueled Forward for “nourish.”)
We brought the squad to life on the campaign site through custom illustrations and animation. We built a page for each persona, which in turn gave us the opportunity to create short, engaging tidbits of information about that step. For example, each page featured little hints – such as, where to start, what to set as a goal, and how to use that particular step to confront a challenge. We also created for each page a unique video compilation of NBA fans, explaining what they do to move, play, pause, learn, connect, and nourish in their everyday lives.
The Campaign was featured on nationally televised ESPN/ABC and TNT playoff broadcasts, league social platforms, and in-arena large-format digital programming. The website proved highly successful in engaging audiences about these core mental health themes. An impressive 60 percent of all visitors took at least one action, with more than 30 percent of visitors starting the quiz to identify their own mental health style.
