On Nov. 5, as the world waited with bated breath to find out the outcome of the US presidential election, the mental health app Calm saw a prime advertising opportunity.
The company, which offers subscribers meditation recordings and other products, ran ads on ABC, CNN, and Comedy Central offering viewers “30 seconds of silence” amid Election Night coverage. The ad buy allowed the brand to show up in front of millions of eyeballs while avoiding an overt political message.
It’s a marketing playbook that other mental health apps are following as the second Trump administration begins to take shape. Other mental health and fitness apps including Talkspace and Headspace are navigating the post-election period with advertising and branding that seeks to project impartiality while also acknowledging the heightened emotions that some segments of its customer base may be experiencing in the current political climate.
“In the US, we conducted a poll back in September and found that one in four Americans said that elections caused them to have poorer mental health, and half of our members told us that the current political climate is one of their top stressors,” Connie Chan Wang, SVP of marketing at Headspace, told Marketing Brew. “How we’ve approached it is by empowering people with the tools to help them get through those stressful moments.”
Keep calm and carry on?
When it comes to messaging around the election and its aftermath, Headspace has opted to emphasize the mental health resources available through the platform that, Chan Wang said, anyone could benefit from.
“It’s likely that no matter who you decided to vote for, you’ve experienced some level of distress or division,” she said. “From a marketing perspective, the way that we show up is really…helping people name what they’re feeling. Is it anger? Is it frustration? Is it anxiety?...Something that we really encourage people to do is think about how they might be able to take action, whether that’s practicing kindness or compassion for people in their community.”
To that end, Headspace rolled out a new toolkit in June, called Politics Without Panic, which offers mental health resources, including a quiz that evaluates users’ stress levels and provides them with meditations and exercises. The collection saw a 315% spike in engagement the day after the election, according to the company.
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On World Mental Health Day in October, Headspace debuted Ebb, an “in-app empathetic AI companion” that communicates with users and encourages them to reflect and be mindful. During the week of the election. Ebb exchanged 6,000 chats with users, according to Headspace, and since the election, free trials and subscription memberships have jumped 13%.
As Headspace focused on users seeking mental health support in the wake of the election, the online therapy provider Talkspace leaned into the potential effects of the political climate on relationships as part of its messaging to consumers, Katelyn Watson, Talkspace’s CMO, told Marketing Brew. In September, the company hosted a webinar on the topic, where Talkspace team members coached attendees on ways to strengthen relationships “even if you feel differently politically from other people that you’re around all the time,” she said.
Since Talkspace has pivoted in recent years to be more of a B2B business than a B2C one, part of the goal of the webinar in September was to allow its enterprise clients to reach their own teams ahead of the election with the information in the webinar.
It appears that Talkspace’s resources are in demand: The conversion rate from its websites into sign-ups for the service is “higher than it’s been in quite a long time,” Watson told Marketing Brew in late November.
To further market its offerings, Talkspace leans on programmatic advertising, and Watson said it’s mulling a presence on Bluesky, which has seen substantial growth amid the changes and controversies surrounding X and its owner Elon Musk. It’s already grabbed a handle on Bluesky, although it hasn’t built out a strategy for the platform yet, she said.
“X and now Bluesky [are] primary platforms where people are getting information, probably more so than in the past, during and leading into and after the election,” she said. Talkspace is “certainly inspired from a marketing perspective, as we’re always listening to our audiences and thinking about, How can we connect with them? How can we get in front of them?”