Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska

As Senior Brand Strategist, I’m responsible for ensuring the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska brand is protected and powerfully expressed, wherever it shows up in the world.

Here are some selected highlights.

Healthy Home Team campaign

In April 2024, our CEO came to the Communications team with a big vision: "Hang a Blue Cross sign in every high school gym or field in the state.”

I ran with this challenge, engineering and executing a program that:

will deliver on this goal in three years, partnering with 100 schools annually
lives up to our mission of improving health and well-being, delivering $55,000 in grants directly into Nebraska communities
minimizes administrative burden by inviting schools to apply and promote the program

Just eight weeks later, we launched the Healthy Home Team program.

In our first year, we exceeded our target of 100 applications. We heard from 58 of Nebraska’s 93 counties, including the #5 and #10 least populous counties in America. (Shout out to the McPherson County Longhorns and Loup County Wolfpack!)

The program has earned significant media attention. Omaha Magazine published a feature right away, and we’ve garnered writeups in the Bridgeport News-Blade, Arlington Citizen, Falls City Journal, Humphrey Democrat, Ainsworth Star-Journal, Shelton Clipper, North Bend Eagle, Stapleton Enterprise, Valley Voice, Crawford Clipper, Mullen-Hooker County Tribune, and the Wayne Herald — to name a few. This is all due to the tenacity and expertise of my pal Cassie Jahn, communications strategist at BCBSNE.

Using the conservative estimates below, the program will generate around 1.9 million impressions/year when it reaches scale. For comparison, the population of Nebraska is just over 1.9 million.

200 attendees per sporting event
x 30 home events per year
x 309 high schools in Nebraska

≈ 1.9 million impressions annually

Brand creative direction

Although the Blue Cross Blue Shield brands are known and trusted nationwide, BCBSNE emerged from the COVID era in need of a reintroduction to our state. Though existing design work was technically sound, our visual identity as a whole was scattered and lacked unity.

I developed a design language that leans into BCBS’s signature brand blue: a uniquely powerful and ownable identifier in the health insurance landscape. Though simple, the system is flexible enough to extend across hundreds of applications each year. It’s not a long-term design system, but through this system we’ve been able to move quickly while cashing in on 85 years of brand equity in that Blue.

The gallery below shows selected work in this new style. In addition to leading the way on the visual system, I wrote all the copy you see here.

Open enrollment campaign, 2024-2025

Most Americans’ only opportunity to renew or change their health insurance happens every fal/winter. These windows are called Open Enrollment or Annual Enrollment Periods. Naturally, they’re a busy time for the whole company, but especially our team.

In support of my colleagues’ efforts to acquire new members for specific health plans, I lead a statewide brand campaign to keep BCBSNE top of mind during this critical window and create a halo effect around our products.

This year, we explored messaging that reinforced BCBSNE as a trusted partner in everyday health. We also leaned into the news that our consumers ranked us the Heartland’s best customer experience. I developed a unique visual language for this campaign, harmonious with our overall brand identity (above) but better able to support the trophy graphic.

All-employee meeting design explorations

When company leadership started planning a series of four all-employee meetings in 2024, I took the lead designing options for the events’ unified look and feel. The goal was to develop a cohesive event identity that would be:

harmonious with our corporate brand, while pushing it in new and unexpected ways to energize an internal audience
applicable across diverse touchpoints in physical and digital media
flexible enough to extend no matter what themes popped up later in the year
beautiful

Ultimately, a different, less thematic approach was preferred, but I’m proud of this work. This early-round exploration deck of unselected concepts showcases the strategic approach that is central to my practice as a creative and marketer.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll get to use some of these ideas someday.

DISCLAIMER

All work displayed on this page was produced as a function of my employment with BCBSNE, and is owned by BCBSNE. BCBSNE is not responsible for the content of this website. All views expressed on this webpage are my own and not those of BCBSNE.