According to hundreds of billboards, bus sides, and direct mailings: Do.
Of course, you are already doing something. You are reading a billboard. As you do, you learn this is not enough in the doing department. You should “groove your body for ten minutes three times a day.” Grooving includes such agreeable activities as dog walking, skipping, and snowman building. It does not include reading. (Reading about the Do campaign in a magazine is, one hopes, a sort of awareness-building limbo.)
On the other hand, if this all sounds pretty unambitious to you, you’re probably not in the target market. Even as the Surgeon General is recommending sixty minutes of physical activity per American adult each day, it is Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota that is taking this more direct approach. It is aiming to get the most sedentary—and expensive—Minnesotans on their feet.
“Do is directed at people who aren’t physically active,” said Dr. Marc Manley. He is the director of Blue Cross’s Center for Tobacco Reduction and Health Improvement. That is the rather flat-sounding name of the organization responsible for these upbeat ads. “We’re trying to get them on something that’s manageable. We’re trying to help them understand that moving’s fun.” The campaign’s most guerilla feature is something Manley calls “decision prompts”—strategically placed ads that guilt-trip you into, say, taking the stairs instead of the escalator.
Some people are confused by the bite-sized exercise tips, which are communicated via billboards, television and newspaper ads, bus wraps, and “spectaculars” (that’s ad lingo for 3-D installations, most notably the mirror ball hanging above Block E). There is no indication on the billboards as to who is worried about their health. Blue Cross’s name does not appear anywhere on the billboards, although its logo does show up in newspaper and television versions, alongside its co-sponsor, the American Heart Association. Manley said, “We didn’t want to clutter it up.” As a result, many Do admirers assume it is a state-sponsored public service campaign.
So what’s in it for Blue Cross? Put simply, because fat people contract cancer and heart disease almost as often as smokers, the state’s largest health insurer claims to pay out the nose to treat the inactivity-related illnesses of an increasingly corpulent populace. It would seem, then, that Blue Cross’s strategy is to save money by spending; the company said it expects to save two dollars on health spending for every dollar spent on Do—with the fringe benefit of possibly improving the health of some people whom it does not insure. (By contrast, United Health Care—the Minnesota-based insurer that pays CEO William McGuire around $100 million per year—is apparently too hard-pressed to care about the public’s laziness.)
Dr. Manley’s office is, in fact, now the de facto public health arm of Blue Cross of Minnesota. It was founded in 1999 after the company, which was then preoccupied with smoking, successfully sued a group of tobacco companies. Blue Cross’s very public, very lucrative payout in that lawsuit compelled it to launch the center, which is wholly devoted to spreading good health across Minnesota.
As the center gained momentum over its first five years, a survey of the public-health situation revealed a landscape in which love handles are more pervasive than smoker’s cough. This inspired Do. The $6.7 million campaign—Blue Cross’s biggest initiative ever—buys a lot of billboards and bus shelters. It seems like an earnest effort rather than a perfunctory public-relations campaign, especially since all $460 million of Blue Cross’s tobacco settlement is still tangled up in litigation.
Manley won’t venture a guess as to when the tobacco settlement dollars will be available, but in the meantime, he said, the center won’t be twiddling its thumbs. “We’re going ahead as best as we can with health improvement programs, but not at the level we will once we can use those dollars,” he said. In other words, those commands to “groove your body,” as widespread as they seem, are just the beginning of what may be a permanent ad campaign nagging you to get off your duff. That huffing sound you now hear is the result of a sort of corporate body-groove: It is local ad agencies and media companies hyperventilating.—Christy DeSmith
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