category finalist
masha@transportnewyork.com
It’s hard to imagine any organization with higher stakes for health and wellbeing than the NFL. Serving as the league’s official health insurer for 30 years, being chosen time and again, should have been a slam dunk endorsement for Cigna Healthcare. But they’d somehow never quite cracked the storytelling to effectively share those wins with the world.
So Cigna turned to us for a series of short films focused on the health journey of a current or retired player who’d experienced the Cigna difference up close. The videos would appear across Cigna’s and the players’ digital and social channels, but their primary role would be evergreen B2B client and prospect engagement. From tentpole events and local market activations to lead-nurture campaigns, the videos would show employers that Cigna is a trusted insurer of choice—and why.
As longform brand content, the films didn’t need to function as ads with CTAs and paid media plans. But they absolutely did need to position Cigna as an indispensable partner when it matters most. For us, the biggest question was how to deliver on that ask without a hint of the forced, “it worked for me” declarations that come with so much of B2B testimonial video.
Our solution was to treat players as people first—people with success stories, yes, but also people with real needs, real fears, and real lives. Our north star became the experience of watching a great sports documentary, the kind of story that takes you behind the scenes, off the field and past the mythmaking. Cigna would appear because it had genuinely impacted the featured players’ lives. The NFL would appear because it made the players who they are. But the emotional center of each film would be a man who needed help, got it, and eventually came out the other side.
In each film, we combined three visual approaches for an immersive, cinematic experience: archival material, black and white talking head interviews, and documentary scenes shot at one location from the player’s life today. That three-part recipe cohered the videos into a series while deftly navigating production realities. More importantly, each approach delivered on a specific storytelling need. Archival stills and motion allowed us to look back on life before the NFL or visualize earlier steps in a health journey. Pulling our interviews into black and white with a simple studio backdrop helped players speak intimately and personally, building the quiet, reflective tone we were looking for. Returning to full color in an expansive landscape—whether it was outdoors or underwater—gave us an optimistic, uplifting “after” state without heavy-handed testimony.
In every other creative decision, from endcard graphics and lower thirds typography to sound design, we were as minimalist as possible. We wanted those elements to make seamless, almost invisible contributions to the overall experience of each player’s story
