Aspen Dental: Healthy Mouth Movement

CHALLENGE
This one is not just a business challenge. It’s a category challenge. There’s a dental crisis in this country. Millions of people aren’t taking care of their mouths, with major health implications ranging from oral cancer to heart trouble. And one of the contributing factors is a nationwide shortage of dentists—especially in the more remote rural locations.

SOLUTION
Mark Taylor and I led our team to come up with the ambitious idea of starting a Healthy Mouth Movement. The good part was that HMM built organically on things people at Aspen were already doing. Some of the dentists and hygienists were doing outreach and donating free dentist work, including organizing trips to places such as Haiti.

EXECUTION
As part of our HMM idea, we came up with the overarching theme of Giving America a Healthy Mouth. The campaign included launch ads about the crisis along with some amazing activation ideas.

As part of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s pitch for the business, Stephen Dalton and Bryan Lee came up with The Mouthmobile, a dentist office on wheels. We presented it during the pitch as a traveling dentist office to help people lacking dental care.

We created a write-up and rough design along with a tour plan, showing how it could help some needy people, clean up some mouths, and generate some content along the way.

We won the account (which in those days wasn’t too surprising) and the Mouthmobile got made (which was). Our team researched how to get it built with vendors, costs, and timing. Crucially, some of the Aspen Dental clients took it on as their own and advocated for getting it made, especially Kasey Pickett and Mike Petrocelli, along with the CMO Mark Censoprano.

Noah Will and Josh Gross did a strong manifesto print ad to launch the campaign to give America a healthy mouth.

10 years later, Aspen continues the Healthy Mouth Movement with an annual company-wide Day of Service. Their people have donated more than $23 million in dentistry services to more than 30,000 veterans and people in need.

The Mouthmobile has hundreds of thousands of miles on it and has made over 125 stops. And it’s still on the road.

The Mouthmobile is one of the things I’m proudest of. It didn’t get much industry press or win any awards, but it’s helped thousands of people. And I’ll happily take that.