• by Les Luchter , May 1, 2023

With May 1 marking the start of Mental Health Awareness Month, may we boldly ask, “What does anxiety mean to you?”

Sounds audacious, but that was the question posed to strangers in a couple of New York suburbs by mental healthcare provider LifeStance Health over two days last month. The resulting answers from 28 people form the basis of a stigma-busting ad campaign launching today.

The series of videos and display ads includes responses like “My main cause of anxiety is not feeling accepted,” “My thoughts race all night,” and 26 others.

The campaign’s creative agency is The Unquantifiable, launched in 2020 by Brandon Ralph, longtime partner and chief creative officer of Code and Theory, whom LifeStance senior vice president of marketing Ashley Anderson met while both worked at Equinox a few years back.

Ralph also worked with Anderson on an earlier 2021 iteration of the LifeStance campaign, called “No Face.”

“We used talent [actors] for that campaign,” Anderson tells Marketing Daily. The idea, she says, was to show that “there’s no one face to any mental health condition.”

“This time, we wanted to take it a little bit deeper,” she explains, with the result being “probably the most serious, emotional work I’ve ever done in 20 years of marketing.

Anderson and the production crew spent two intense days going into storefronts and getting people’s answer to “What does anxiety mean to you?,” first in Beacon, New York and then in Bronxville, New York -- “two very different towns, socioeconomically,” she notes.

Bronxville is one of the wealthiest places in the U.S. according to Wikipedia; median household income in Beacon was reportedly $45,236. Yet people in both places had similar areas of anxiety.

“We’d never met these people and they were just divulging what was on their mind and what they deal with day in and day out,” Anderson says. “We got such honest, raw answers. It shows they want to destigmatize mental health.

“We had people talk about the effects of childhood and people talking about just day-to-day life and time going too fast,” she recalls. “Someone started talking about how they suffered from agoraphobia, and we had someone who was severely introverted….and talked about how he has a hard time getting out of bed and getting to his job, but he needs to work."

The new campaign is scheduled to run throughout the year on paid social (Meta, TikTok), YouTube, display/native and paid search, with Cardinal Digital Marketing handling the media buying.

The goal of “No Face,” Anderson says, is to “push toward ending the stigma around mental health conditions, and ultimately increase access to care.” The target audience is 19- to 54 year-olds, skewing female, who have an interest in mental health, have mental health conditions and/or consume mental health-related content.

Founded in 2017, LifeStance touts a hybrid approach to treating mental health. “We can see you virtually, or we can see you in person,” says Anderson.

The physical locations, numbering more than 600 in 34 states, are increasingly important as consumer demand for in-person visits grows.

At the height of the pandemic, virtual visits represented 95% of LifeStance’s appointments, chief executive officer and chairman Ken Burdick told analysts on a recent earnings call.  That number had dipped to 78% in the fourth quarter of 2022, and is “now getting towards the mid-70s” with a “slow and steady trend” downwards, Burdick said. 

The company’s 5,600 full-time clinicians (psychologists and therapist) treated 680,000 patients in 5.7 million virtual and in-person visits during 2022, he reported.

LifeStance, however, does plan to close about 30 to 40 offices in “close proximity” to other locations, “with minimal to no disruption to our clinicians or patients,” Burdick said.

On the other hand, added president and chief operating officer Danish Qureshi, the company also plans to open 40 to 45 new locations this year.

LifeStance reported $229 million in revenues in the fourth quarter, a 21% increase year-over-year, and projected first quarter revenues of $242 million to $252 million. Actual results will be announced on May 10.