athenahealth is a cloud-based healthcare technology company focused on improving clinical effectiveness, connected care, and patient experience.
Working as part of the team at Collosus, I helped develop a global brand refresh and integrated campaign platform designed to reintroduce the brand through a more expressive and emotionally resonant visual identity.
Working as part of the team at Collosus, I helped develop a global brand refresh and integrated campaign platform designed to reintroduce the brand through a more expressive and emotionally resonant visual identity.
Client: athenahealth
Work: Brand Refresh
Done while working at Colossus.
Collaborators: Aggressive, The Voorhes, Randal Ford
Work: Brand Refresh
Done while working at Colossus.
Collaborators: Aggressive, The Voorhes, Randal Ford
The Opportunity:
Healthcare and technology are both crowded spaces filled with brands that often feel cold, corporate, or overly functional. athenahealth sat directly between those two worlds, which created an interesting challenge: how do you make a highly technical platform feel intelligent without losing the human side of healthcare?
Most competitors communicated through generic healthcare imagery or dense product messaging. We wanted athenahealth to feel more emotionally aware and more connected to the realities of modern care rather than simply presenting itself as another software platform.
The Campaign:
The campaign repositioned athenahealth as a more connected and human presence within healthcare IT.
Instead of focusing purely on product features, we built stories around the real experiences happening inside modern healthcare. Issues like clinician burnout, disconnected patient data, administrative overload, and the complexity of care itself.
This included large-scale campaign spots like “Lonely Data” and “Olivia,” alongside a global rollout spanning digital, brand, social, product, and experiential touchpoints.
The Visual Language:
The visual identity moved away from the sterile aesthetic common within healthcare and tech marketing.
We used color, movement, metaphor, and layered storytelling to make technical subjects feel more approachable and emotionally engaging. A modular “cluster” system was developed to represent more than 30 medical specialties, helping create consistency across a massive ecosystem of communications and products.
The broader visual language combined CG, photography, illustration, and motion into a system that could scale across the brand while still feeling cohesive and recognizable.
We created custom “clusters” representing over 30 medical specialties and developed a motion language that brought consistency and dynamism across all touchpoints. Anchored by cinematic campaign work — including the hero spots “Lonely Data” and “Olivia” — the revitalized brand set a new benchmark for health-tech storytelling.
Impact
+29% Lift in Brand Awareness2× Industry Norm for Brand Recall
+40% Internal Impressions
+87% Internal Engagement
