Long Game: Inside a Multi-Year Mental Health Campaign and Why It’s (Still) Working

For the past decade, designRoom has been working with Cohen Veterans Network on a mental health campaign—one that has stood the test of time and continues to evolve. When we started, the campaign supported 5 clinics in 4 states. Today, CVN supports 22 clinics across 12 states and Washington, DC. Here’s how we made that growth happen.

How Did This All Begin?

Our partnership began with research—in-depth interviews, surveys, and conversations with veterans and family members. The single most important finding was that veterans trust other veterans above all else.

Additionally, we identified four distinct audience categories:

Veterans Spectrum of Involvement in Mental Health Care

The primary target was that ‘Disconnected and Waiting’ group—veterans who weren’t currently seeking help, but who were open to it when the time felt right.

Our creative strategy took what we learned about CVN’s audiences and their key motivators and we translated that into what we called “reasons to believe.” Those reasons all contributed to our foundational campaign message: Back to Better.

The Life of the Back to Better Campaign

Audience + Campaign Messaging Strategy

Our insights led us to center the campaign on authentic veteran and family stories—stories of hope, change, and community. Our Back to Better theme has guided the campaign from the start.

While the theme “Back to Better” hasn’t changed, the campaign continues to evolve creatively, tactically and strategically. 

For example, in the early years, we sent crews to clinics for professional photography and video shoots. The look was polished, the production high-end, and it worked. These polished stories became the foundation for all ads, web, and social.

Then came COVID. We pivoted to recording our interviews virtually, with lower production value and a more grassroots feel. Unexpectedly, this change improved the campaign by showing our clients more at ease, in their home environments. This authenticity deepened the trust factor, and the results spoke for themselves.

But this isn’t the only change we’ve adapted to on the fly. Over the course of the campaign, we have expanded our targeting to include military family and active-duty military members. And in order to measure our progress over time, we define strategic KPIs and continually evaluate creative performance.

Data Drives Everything

There really aren’t benchmarks out there for mental health, only healthcare in general, so how do you know if what you’re doing is working?

A huge thing for us is going beyond the typical advertising metrics and working with CVN’s IT team to track conversions at the end of the journey—to find out who went on to become a client.

Campaign Evolution – Data Drives Everything

Our process includes data at every step, going through the cycle above during yearly planning and throughout the year. Yearly planning considers every facet of the campaign with data in mind. With monthly and quarterly meetings, we’re able to optimize and analyze nimbly and strategically. Every evolution of the campaign is built on what we’ve learned.

Long-Term Value

Back to Better has stood the test of time because it’s flexible. A long-term campaign doesn’t mean you never change—it means you use the data to make deliberate decisions.

This campaign is complex, with 22 clinics at the time of writing and multiple tactics for each clinic that are reconsidered regularly. Still, we monitor and adjust. We don’t just set it and forget it. We let the data guide us, and when it’s not working, we pivot.

At the same time, the fundamental core of the campaign has not changed. The Cohen Veterans Network brand, our client stories and word-of-mouth, and the Back to Better campaign all align with the ‘Reasons to Believe’ we discovered in our research nearly a decade ago.

• CVN is easy and efficient
• CVN’s specialization in mental health
• CVN helps the whole family
• CVN treats regardless of combat or discharge status
• CVN deals with all mental health, not just PTSD

What’s Next

The latest evolution of the campaign is adding entirely new storytelling angles:

• We are adding active-duty voices.
• Remember, we found that veterans trust fellow veterans the most? With more than 50% of CVN clinicians being veterans, we’re now highlighting their stories, demonstrating CVN’s military cultural competency.
• And we’re integrating AI—a shift that will impact both creative and distribution strategies.

We’re actively working on ways to adapt, from optimizing our content so that it’s visible and relevant within AI-generated summaries, to shifting media spend toward placements and formats that can’t be bypassed so easily. AI isn’t just changing search results, it’s reshaping the client journey to engagement, and we want to make sure the ‘Back to Better’ campaign stays front and center in today’s evolving landscape.

With data at the center of all our decision-making, and years of thoughtful partnership between Cohen Veterans Network and our team, we see collaboration with our client as the true reason Why It’s Still Working.