Defeating the demons

California – A new ad featuring National Basketball Association player Stephen Curry addresses the issue of men’s mental health.

• The #TrainTheMind campaign includes interviews with Stephen Curry and fellow player Chris Paul
• It follows the brand’s long-running Thrive campaign, which focused on physical health and wellbeing

Commissioned by healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente, the ad deviates from the brand’s typically light-hearted approach to advertising. It depicts Golden State Warriors player Curry as he prepares to enter a sensory deprivation tank and is accompanied by a voiceover of critical soundbites, including ‘he is not one of the greats yet’ and ‘it’s about titles’.

Curry descends into the tank and is surrounded by jellyfish basketball nets that swim menacingly beneath the water and basketballs that plummet into its murky depths. Curry breathes deeply and recites the words ‘calm, strong, focused’, and walks out onto a basketball court, followed by the tagline ‘Train the mind. The body will follow’.

‘We are moving from being more inspirational around telling people to thrive to acknowledging that thriving is hard and difficult,’ Lawrence Montgomery, senior director of national advertising at Kaiser Permanente, tells Creativity Online.