Express Your Health: inside Bupa's global creativity-and-health campaign launch

Two years ago we built Picture of Health for Bupa — a global Paralympics-tied competition that asked people to share what health meant to them through a photograph. It went better than anyone expected. AI moderation kept the platform safe at scale, the press picked it up across every major UK outlet, and Bupa had a campaign they could trust.

This year, they came back. And they wanted to go bigger.

The brief

Express Your Health takes the same fundamental idea — health is personal, and creativity is one of the most honest ways to express it — and turns it into something far more ambitious. Instead of photographs, art. Instead of one moment in time, a year-long global campaign. Instead of one platform, eight languages, three launch markets (UK, Spain, Australia), and Europe's largest hand-painted mural anchoring the launch.

The campaign is grounded in new Bupa research, run by Opinium across 4,000 adults in those three markets. The headline finding: 85% of people agree creativity supports their mental and physical health, but almost half (47%) don't spend any time on creative hobbies. The science backs it up — Katherine Templar Lewis at Kinda Studios (the creative neuroscience studio Bupa partnered with) points out that even 30–45 minutes of art or drawing measurably lowers cortisol and supports emotional regulation. Express Your Health exists to close that gap.

The mural lives on Waterloo Bridge in London — 22 double-decker buses long, produced with Global Street Art, and painted by 21 commissioned artists and storytellers including Tom Daley, Sophie Tea, Yinka Ilori, Coco Dávez, Cody Weightman, Richard Whitehead MBE, Rizzy Akanji, 72kilos and Sophia Hotung. Every panel is a real health story — fertility, sickle cell, diabetes, anxiety, ageing, grief — told visually. The QR code at the centre of it points to the platform we built, where anyone in the world can add their own.

What we built

A bespoke headless platform: Laravel 13 / PHP 8.3 on the backend, Filament v5 for the admin, PostgreSQL, S3 for media, and a Next.js 15 frontend. Eight live locales (English, Spanish in two flavours, Polish, Portuguese Brazilian, Turkish, Traditional Chinese, French) with proper BCP 47 handling and per-locale fallbacks.

The interesting part is what happens when someone submits artwork. An observer fires a chain of background jobs: image safety evaluation, content moderation on the caption, automatic alt-text generation via GPT-4 Vision, then machine translation of the caption into every supported language. By the time the user gets a thank-you email, their submission is either live in the global gallery or sitting in a Bupa moderator queue inside Filament. Editors, moderators and admins each have their own scoped permissions; nothing reaches the public site without the right people having signed it off.

It's the kind of architecture that only really pays off at this scale — but at this scale, it's the only thing that works.

Launch weekend

The campaign went live on Monday 19 May 2026. The mural was unveiled on Waterloo Bridge, Sanitas wrapped their Madrid HQ in a giant canvas of the same artwork the following day, and DOOH activations lit up Sydney, Melbourne and the Gran Vía in Madrid simultaneously. I went down to the South Bank on launch day to see it in person:

That's me looking very pleased with myself, and rightly so. The QR code over my shoulder is the one we'd been pointing every part of this campaign at for months — scan it and you land on the platform we built.

The 48-hour numbers

Bupa's PR team sent over a results deck on Wednesday morning. The launch numbers are absurd:

• 800M audience through press and radio
• 81 pieces of global media coverage
• 8.6M social audience reach
• 7,300+ likes, comments and shares on social
• 20 influencer posts including Joe Wicks, Tom Daley and Richard Whitehead MBE
• 3M+ video views
• 3 simultaneous launch-day activations — London, Spain, Australia

Coverage landed across BBC World Service, Yahoo, Hong Kong Business Times, Sina, Taiwan News, Marketing Interactive, Branding in Asia, Famous Campaigns, ConSalud, Londonist and Ctrl Publicidad — among 71 others. Joe Wicks (4.7M followers) and Tom Daley (3.7M) both posted. Sophie Tea (1M) called it "MASSSSSIVE" when she saw the billboard in real life. The Body Coach commented "Proud to be part of this." 72kilos posted to 2.3M followers in Spain.

Tom Daley, who contributed a knitted tapestry, summed up the whole campaign neatly in the press release: "Knitting started as a way to relax and focus during intense periods of training, but it quickly had a deeper impact on my health. Over the years it has helped me manage stress, boost my mood, and enabled me to process experiences when I couldn't find the words." That's the campaign in one quote — and there are 20 more stories on the mural saying versions of the same thing.

The platform held up. Submissions flowed in from every continent. Moderation queues drained as quickly as they filled. The site has been stable through the entire spike — which, having spent the last few months stress-testing every corner of it, is the result I cared most about.

Why this one matters

Picture of Health was the project that earned us the trust to do this one. Express Your Health is the project where we got to apply everything we learned the first time, and then push it further — multilingual from day one, AI moderation as a default rather than an add-on, a CMS Bupa's regional teams can actually run themselves without a developer in the loop.

It's also a reminder of why I love working in this corner of the industry. The platform itself is invisible. What people see is a mural on Waterloo Bridge, billboards lighting up commuter routes in Sydney and Melbourne, a giant canvas wrapping Sanitas in Madrid, and a website that lets them add their own story to all of it. That's the work doing its job.

You can read the full case study on Express Your Health, or — much more importantly — go and add your own health story at expressyourhealth.bupa.com.