Winner 2025
Brand & Media Owner Partnership
Brand
Bupa UK
Entered by:
National Geographic
Picture of Health
The Challenge
Bupa wants to shift perceptions from ‘Bupa: the health insurance company’ to ‘Bupa: a world-leading healthcare company’. Their mission is to build global recognition as a brand that gets health.
As the Official Healthcare Partner for the National Paralympics Associations in nine countries around the world, the Bupa team worked closely with Para athletes to create a campaign showing that health isn’t one-dimensional and means something different to each of us. They launched their ‘Picture of Health’ campaign featuring renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz’s images of six Para athletes. Bupa briefed National Geographic CreativeWorks to create a brand content partnership that would drive greater campaign awareness and reach.
Bupa sought a partner who could drive broad media reach, after all health effects everyone, but also, with the capability to bring the narratives to life through engaging articles and videos. They wanted to leverage National Geographic’s world-class production and storytelling to inspire audiences with stories of Para athletes featured in their brand campaign. They saw an opportunity to encourage individuals to share their own health stories that reflected what health meant to them.
The three main goals of the partnership content were to:
- Inspire audiences with a deeper story of health through the lens of others.
- Start a conversation on what health is, engaging audiences to share their own images depicting health.
- Boost awareness with increased reach of ‘The Picture of Health’ campaign messaging.
A broad demographic audience of 18+ male and female, specifically in UK, Spain and Australia markets, was requested, and interest targeting around health and wellness would be layered for contextual and mindset alignment.
The opportunity was to create a story-led campaign that would not only amplify but enrich Bupa’s own brand campaign by focusing deeper on the amazing individuals’ journeys as Para athletes.
The Content Solution
Bupa’s brand campaign aimed to inspire people to reflect on their personal relationship with health by showcasing what health means to some of the world’s most remarkable athletes. The inspiring stories of powerful athletes meant we had the perfect conversation kick-starter to encourage people to take a deeper look at their relationship with their health and what health means to them.
Key for the strategic direction was utilising the incredible images created by photographer Annie Leibovitz, who had previously captured the health story of each Para athlete through her striking portraits.
Using the images as a jumping off point for the National Geographic content, we could dive deeper into two of the featured Para athlete health journeys, as an authentic linkage to Bupa’s ‘Picture of Health’ campaign. Portrait storytelling allows the audience to follow Sara Andrés and Emmanual Oyinbo-Coker’s health journeys from their early beginnings, understanding their personal stories through videos and articles. The story arc was crafted to offer audiences insight into their lives and shine a light on opportunities to understand and apply learnings to their own lives, regardless of having levels of health associated with high-performing athletes.
The team produced compelling, high-quality visuals that showcased real-life stories, health journeys, and the beauty of nature in our human experience. The ‘Picture of Health’ campaign on National Geographic conveyed the core thought that health is multifaceted—encompassing physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
In addition to the inclusion of Annie Leibovitz’s photography, we invited audiences to submit their own portraits through a photo competition across our social channels, launched and moderated by esteemed National Geographic Photographer Anastacia Taylor-Lind. Selects from submissions were posted on our social channels with input and commentary from Anastacia.
A central hub on nationalgeographic.com provided a home for two 3” videos with associated articles. Cutdowns at 15”, 30”, and 60” were created for media placements on the website and in social media. Additionally, a set of banners were created for driving native content across nationalgeographic.com.
The National Geographic and Bupa ‘Picture of Health’ collaboration was authentic to Bupa because it aligned with the brand’s mission to build global recognition as a brand that understands health is unique to each of us.
Through world-class video, written content, and a global photography challenge, our campaign emphasized the importance of living a healthier life, and supported a community platform to help people achieve their best health outcomes.
The Media/Content Amplification Solution
Bupa approached National Geographic CreativeWorks due to their expertise in world-class video production and storytelling, and because they required a media plan to extend the reach of their brand campaign.
Bupa sought a partner to both amplify these important stories and spark a meaningful global conversation about the deep connection between health and self – with main KPIs being mass awareness and engagement.
Bupa was looking to specifically target audiences in the UK, Australia and Spain, where the National Geographic brand is strong, so we utilised four specific strengths of the National Geographic ecosystem:
- We leveraged National Geographic’s own YourShot community on Instagram.
- We used organic and paid tactics on our earned social media channels, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
- We extended the campaign to Disney+ which not only increased reach but also excelled at delivering high video completion rates in the streaming environment.
- We drove all placements and social posts across the platforms to the new branded content hubbed on dedicated pages on nationationalgeographic.com.
National Geographic’s YourShot is a highly engaged global photography community proprietary to National Geographic on Instagram. We launched a hashtag challenge and asked the @NatGeoYourShot Instagram community of amateur and professional photographers to share their own photos that captured their picture of what health is and what it means to them, using our unique hashtag. #BupaPictureofHealthChallenge.
In-feed photo posts, utilizing archival National Geographic photography around the topic of health, encouraged entries along with four call-out photo posts from editor Anastacia Taylor-Lind (which were then boosted to reach a wider but targeted audience). The selected top six stand-out images were posted to the YourShot feed, with Bupa tagged in the branded content tool and sponsor copy.
To maximise engagement, we distributed Instagram Reels and Facebook video posts to all National Geographic active social accounts. To maximise video completes, we ran the 60” versions of the Sara and Emmanuel videos across the Disney+ platform in the UK.
With strategic optimisations in mind, we created multiple ad sets with the Sara and Emmanual videos. For example, dark Facebook posts are a key website traffic driver, enabling us to continuously test and refine messaging optimising toward click through rates to maximise page views. The interest and contextual targeting focused on health and wellness, wellbeing, nature, healthy diets, science, psychology, National Geographic, National Geographic Society, fitness and wellness, and physical exercise.
The Result
Strong engagement rates and a remarkable 96% positive sentiment in social commentary evidenced the Para athlete’s stories made a deep audience connection, sparking the conversation on the connection between health and self.
Bupa saw increases in all 11 brand metrics amongst people recalling the National Geographic campaign, with a significant perception uplift in Spain and Australia in seeing Bupa as a wellness brand.
Brand tracking indicated the campaign reached 4 of 10 in their target audience, suggesting the unique creative increased reach and likely garnered earned media too.
Media delivered 5X more article pages views than the expected 44,000, with 37+ million impressions and 9 million video views, demonstrating quality traffic and strong audience engagement across formats and channels. The Instagram Reels, Facebook video posts, National Geographic YouTube network and Disney+ platforms all contributed to above-average engagement, generating over 230,000 interactions.
The stories of Sara and Emmanuel had close to 3X higher-than-average dwell times on both video article pages, and the YourShot challenge reached 8.6+ million people (44% of campaign total), with over 600 images shared. The six finalists’ photo posts significantly drove engagement levels 3.7X higher than benchmark.
On Instagram, we saw the highest engagement with the organic National Geographic audience, as photo posts delivered close to 4X more than other channels. The two Reels delivered 6.5M views.
The dark Facebook video posts, showcasing 60” edits of the Sara and Emmanuel videos, delivered 30% of total engagements, with many positive comments.
The UK Disney+ placements with the 60” versions of the videos had completion rates of 92% (90% NG benchmark). The shorter 15” video versions in the UK, Spain and Australia across the National Geographic YouTube network also had a very strong completion rate of 93% (85% NG benchmark).