Emplify Health launched 'A Little Empathy' in 2025 via Cramer-Krasselt, using an animated character to introduce the merged health system across four US states.
ARCHIVEEmplify Health Introduces Itself to the Midwest With a Little Empathy
Emplify Health's 'A Little Empathy' is a 2025 integrated brand-launch campaign created by Cramer-Krasselt that introduced the newly merged health system to communities across Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan through a small blue animated heart character designed to make empathy visible and emotionally immediate.
Emplify Health itself is a product of convergence. As documented by emplifyhealth.org, Bellin Health and Gundersen Health System merged in 2022, and the unified Emplify Health brand was publicly announced in 2024. The name combines the words 'Empathy' and 'Amplify,' a linguistic signal of the organisation's stated positioning around increased access, a culture of empathy, and improved population-health outcomes. 'A Little Empathy' was not a campaign layered onto an existing brand platform — it was the brand platform, the first expression of a new identity in front of communities who needed to be introduced to an organisation they would be trusting with their care.
According to c-k.com, the campaign launched in March 2025 and was published across the United States in April 2025. Its media footprint was deliberately broad and local simultaneously, running across television, social media, out-of-home, print, and digital channels. That geographic and channel specificity reflects a strategic understanding that a healthcare brand earns trust market by market, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, rather than through a single national broadcast moment. In the United States, where regional health system identity carries significant community weight, that approach is not modest — it is precise. The Clapboard Score for 'A Little Empathy' is 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that demonstrates genuine creative conviction and measurable brand impact while operating within the tonal constraints of institutional healthcare marketing.
Emplify Health entered the market at a moment of considerable noise in US healthcare advertising. The US hospital advertising market was estimated at approximately 24.4 billion dollars in 2024 and is projected to reach approximately 34.3 billion dollars by 2033, implying a compound annual growth rate of roughly 3.9 percent, according to Mansi Media. That expansion reflects an industry where health systems are investing heavily to establish preference before patients need care, not only after they do.
Within that competitive landscape, Cramer-Krasselt identified a strategic opening rooted in emotional honesty rather than institutional authority. According to thedrum.com, Betsy Brown, Managing Director at Cramer-Krasselt, stated that the agency sought to create work that felt earned rather than performative — a meaningful distinction in a category where competitors frequently default to aspirational imagery of smiling clinicians and gleaming facilities. Major regional and national health system advertisers, including Advocate Health and Mayo Clinic, occupy significant brand real estate in overlapping geographies across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. Against that backdrop, Emplify Health's decision to centre its launch on an animated character embodying empathy rather than clinical credentials represents a deliberate departure from category convention.
Alison Fiebig, Vice President of Strategy, Brand, Marketing and Communications at Emplify Health, and Kendra Maggert, Marketing Director at Emplify Health, shaped the brand brief around a positioning that emplifyhealth.org describes as a culture of empathy and improved population-health outcomes. That brief gave Cramer-Krasselt licence to treat empathy not as a supporting message but as the central, named, personified protagonist of the campaign — a creative move that is strategically coherent precisely because the organisation's name encodes empathy as its founding promise.
Todd Stone, Executive Creative Director at Cramer-Krasselt, led the creative development of 'A Little Empathy' alongside Jim Root, Group Creative Director, with Kelly Vogt serving as Group Account Director and Taylor Kaine as Account Supervisor, according to c-k.com and reelchicago.com. The central creative decision was the invention of a small blue animated heart — referred to across coverage as 'Little Empathy' — that moves through human healthcare moments not as a hero but as a quiet, present companion.
According to thedrum.com, The Drum's review of the campaign, published in May 2026, praised the character as an 'emotional mascot' that earned its sentiment rather than manufacturing it. The Drum noted specifically that Little Empathy avoids over-cuteness by remaining in the background of scenes, allowing the human emotional reality — fear, exhaustion, family connection, and relief — to occupy the foreground. That restraint is a meaningful craft choice. In healthcare advertising, animated or illustrated characters frequently risk reducing complex emotional experiences to saccharine shorthand. Here, the character's smallness and its positioning at the periphery of each scene function as a visual metaphor for empathy itself: present, attentive, and non-intrusive.
The campaign ran across television, social, out-of-home, print, and digital channels, meaning the Little Empathy character had to maintain coherence across formats with fundamentally different viewing distances, dwell times, and emotional registers. That the character sustained recognisable identity from a billboard to a social clip to a television spot is evidence of disciplined visual system design. According to reelchicago.com and c-k.com, the character also translated into branded merchandise — plush toys — that sold out immediately following the campaign's launch, confirming that the creative work had generated genuine affective attachment rather than passive recognition.
ARCHIVENo broad third-party audited performance study of 'A Little Empathy' is publicly available, but the brand and agency have disclosed specific outcome data that substantiates the campaign's effectiveness at the awareness and attribution level. According to c-k.com and reelchicago.com, brand awareness increased by an average of 28 percentage points across Emplify Health's two key regions within five months of the campaign's launch in the United States. That figure is a meaningful result for a brand-introduction campaign operating in markets where competing health systems carry decades of accumulated recognition.
According to reelchicago.com, more than 60 percent of community members surveyed attributed their discovery of Emplify Health directly to the campaign. That attribution rate is unusually high for a multi-channel brand campaign and suggests strong creative distinctiveness — consumers were not only aware of Emplify Health but could identify the specific campaign as the source of that awareness. The Little Empathy character also generated demand that extended beyond the advertising itself: according to c-k.com, branded plush toys sold out immediately, and requests for Little Empathy appearances at community events were received by the organisation, indicating that the character had crossed from an advertising device into a community asset.
Taken together, these results indicate that the campaign achieved its primary objective — introducing a new health system brand in the United States with sufficient clarity and emotional resonance to drive both unprompted awareness and community identification — within a compressed post-launch window of five months.
'A Little Empathy' is Emplify Health's 2025 brand-launch campaign created by Cramer-Krasselt. It introduced the newly merged health system to communities across Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan using a small blue animated heart character called Little Empathy, deployed across television, social, out-of-home, print, and digital channels.
Cramer-Krasselt created 'A Little Empathy' for Emplify Health. Key agency credits include Todd Stone as Executive Creative Director, Jim Root as Group Creative Director, Kelly Vogt as Group Account Director, and Taylor Kaine as Account Supervisor, according to c-k.com and reelchicago.com.
According to c-k.com and reelchicago.com, the campaign raised brand awareness by an average of 28 percentage points across two key regions within five months. More than 60 percent of community members credited the campaign with introducing them to Emplify Health, and branded Little Empathy plush toys sold out immediately after launch.
Little Empathy is a small blue animated heart character created by Cramer-Krasselt as the central figure of Emplify Health's 2025 brand campaign. According to thedrum.com, the character functions as an emotional mascot that remains in the background of human healthcare scenes, embodying attentive, non-intrusive empathy.
Emplify Health's name combines the words 'Empathy' and 'Amplify,' according to emplifyhealth.org. Cramer-Krasselt built the brand platform around that founding idea, using the Little Empathy character to make an abstract value visible and emotionally immediate across a competitive US healthcare advertising market dominated by conventional clinical imagery.
'A Little Empathy' ran across Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan — the geographic footprint of the merged Emplify Health system. According to c-k.com and reelchicago.com, the campaign launched in March 2025 and used television, social media, out-of-home, print, and digital channels to reach communities across those four states.
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