Thorne’s new spot promoting healthy aging comes in the form of a stroll through an AI landscape, with stops at many of Earth’s greatest destinations: desert landscapes, snow-covered peaks and green fields swaying in gentle breezes. The accompanying voiceover offers a vision of a different and liberating approach to healthcare, focused not on staying healthy rather than staying young.
The zen setting is intentionally otherworldly, and viewers see the actors in the ad only from behind – and only the backs of their heads and hands. The overarching goal: To allow the mental room for a wide range of viewers to connect with the company’s proposition.
According to Thorne HealthTech CMO Michelle Crow, the spot is designed to appeal to the company’s wide customer base: 60% female and 40% male, distributed evenly across ages 25 to 65. “There aren’t a lot of commonalities on the basic demographic front, but what unites our customers is their focus on self-optimization and wanting to be proactive about living a healthier life,” she explained.
In a world where celebrity spokespeople and patient testimonials dominate healthcare marketing, there is a different aesthetic and feel to Thorne’s efforts.
“For a few years we have been building a trusted, digitally native, luxury health brand that doesn’t look like any other brand in the category,” Crow noted. “We felt like this was a good marriage of the painterly people with the product and showing the progression of time as seen in nature, and how it parallels the process in the human body.”
Thorne has long considered its scientific approach to supplements as a distinguishing factor. “We have so much clinical data and we are trusted by the Mayo Clinic,” Crow stressed. “From a tone perspective, we are a little more sophisticated and science-driven. There’s not a lot of market fluffery.”
Perhaps to preemptively address skepticism about the supplement space, Crow goes out of her way to emphasize the rigor of Thorne’s manufacturing and testing processes. Unlike many others, Thorne manufactures all of its products, most in a Somerville, South Carolina.
“We are vertically integrated and control everything from start to finish. We source only the best ingredients, we run a clean process and we conduct four rounds of testing,” Crow said, noting the one or two testing rounds that are most common.
The most recent campaign spot strays from science class to deliver a message that, Thorne hopes, will serve to inspire and empower.
“We reframe it as a journey that we are all on, and say we should all take a look at what we are doing and then be more proactive in investing in our health,” Crow explained. The company’s product-specific spots, by contrast, are focused on the science.
Sportscaster and former NFL star Greg Olsen brings a human face to the overarching campaign, even though he doesn’t appear in the broadcast spots. As a longtime customer of Thorne’s supplements, Olsen is reinforcing the “healthy aging is not anti-aging” message via use social posts, earned media and daily blog contributions.
“One of the cultural movements that we are seeing right now is redefining how we think about aging,” Crow added. “I am excited for the conversation to shift and for people to stop defaulting to anti-aging. The solution is not to try and stop the aging process. It’s to feel better at every age along this journey.”
