As Virginia made the transition from Healthcare.gov to a state-run health insurance exchange, the State Corporation Commission sought to create an approachable brand for its new exchange platform, create awareness of this new entity, and promote enrollment in insurance plans offered on the exchange during its inaugural open enrollment period.
Beginning with an audience research and creative testing effort involving focus groups across the state and a survey of more than 800 uninsured Virginians, Reingold concepted and iterated on numerous brand identities, ultimately arriving at Virginia’s Insurance Marketplace, or “the Marketplace.” We developed an extensive suite of creative assets, including filming three broadcast TV spots, then deployed a phased campaign to launch the new brand, create awareness of the Marketplace, and ultimately drive consumers to explore and enroll in an insurance plan during the open enrollment period beginning November 1, 2023. The campaign spanned numerous paid media channels including broadcast and connected TV; broadcast radio and streaming audio; paid social and search; high impact programmatic and site-direct digital display, including a Virginia-specific YouTube masthead takeover; digital out-of-home; and mobile billboards deployed in high-traffic transit corridors across the state. The campaign also leveraged earned and social media outreach, including a satellite media tour and broadcast TV and radio PSAs.
As a result of this campaign, the state of Virginia was able to enroll more than 400,000 eligible recipients in an insurance plan — putting it among the top-10 state-based inaugural marketplace enrollments in the U.S. The digital campaign delivered more than 190 million impressions, driving more than 635,000 visits to the online enrollment portal and nearly 200,000 calls to the customer help center. In the course of the campaign, digital channel and creative optimization efforts increased clickthrough rates from .33% to .37%, and decreased cost-per-click by 54%. The campaign also secured 220 unique earned media placements in Virginia media markets, achieving more than 32 million impressions. The platform launch and inaugural enrollment campaign has established a strong foundation for continued efforts to connect Virginians with affordable, high-quality health insurance, including a refined targeting approached focused on the highest-need geographies based on 2023 enrollment data.
