Meet The People Behind The 'Brosurance' Obamacare Ads That Are Making The Internet Cringe
That's how a pair of Colorado non-profits are trying to promote Obamacare.
The "Got Insurance?" campaign, which was launched by the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and Progress Now, has three targets: Young adults, women, and minority groups. And to encourage those groups to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, they are creating ads they hope will go "viral" on social media.
Young, healthy people signing up for health insurance is crucial to the success of the law - and this is the best
So far, the ads are working at getting attention- even as the reaction has been mostly negative among commentators. The latest ads released Tuesday are aimed at young women, including a couple that feature actor Ryan Gosling:
"It's been fun to watch how it all plays out," Adam Fox, the director of strategic engagement for the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. "We've seen both positive and negative reactions, but if people are seeing the ads and purchasing health insurance, that's a good thing."
It does appear to be working, at least in that sense. Traffic to the site that features the ads exploded so much on Tuesday that the site went down for a few minutes.
The initiative first gained attention in late October, when the term "#brosurance" started popping up amid the groups' release of ads that featured college-aged men doing keg stands and playing golf. It's the other side of the "creepy Uncle Sam" ads that encouraged young people to "opt out" of Obamacare.
Here's one:
Fox, who graduated from Pacific University in 2007, said that many of the ads are motivated from personal experiences of the people in them. All of the people in the ads, he said, are either personal friends or people they know through various networks.
"We wanted to come up with a campaign that would attract attention and inject a bit of humor, and try to approach educating people about health insurance a little bit differently," Fox said. "It was really just brainstorming, 'OK, what are some of those risky activities we could work with that would tie it all together?'"