States Air Obamacare Ads That Avoid All Mention of Obamacare

Health insurance is hard to make interesting. No one knows this better than Rebecca Armstrong, managing director of North, an advertising agency hired by the state of Oregon to promote its Obamacare health exchange. Cover Oregon, along with other government-run insurance marketplaces nationwide, begins enrollment on Oct. 1. But millions of Americans still have no idea the exchanges exist. It’s Armstrong’s job to get Oregon’s uninsured to sign up. “To introduce a new brand name for an incredibly complicated service that has never existed before in an environment that was already rife with misinformation, and to do it in 60 seconds? That seemed an overwhelming task,” she says.

So she didn’t even try. Instead, she turned to old Woody Guthrie songs for inspiration—“specifically, his Columbia River campaign,” she says. In 1941 the federal government hired the folk singer to write tunes to promote the construction of hydroelectric dams. Guthrie’s lyrics didn’t get into the technical aspects of locks and spillways: He wrote Roll On, Columbia, a patriotic melody so catchy elementary schoolers still sing it.