Travis Gillett Photographs Healthcare Campaign For Inova

There’s a particular kind of lie healthcare advertising has been telling for decades: the doctor holding the stethoscope wrong, the too-white smile, the sterile blue gradient standing in for an entire human being’s fear about their own body. It’s a genre built on distance. Inova decided to close it. See the full campaign here.

“Start Here,” the healthcare system’s latest brand campaign, was directed and photographed by Seattle-based director/photographer Travis Gillett and produced by Unrivaled, on behalf of creative agency Notorious111. Instead of white coats and waiting rooms, Gillett’s camera goes where the real health decisions actually get made, kitchens, living rooms, front porches, the fifteen minutes before you can talk yourself into something.

The tagline is doing more work than a tagline usually gets to. “Start Here” isn’t a slogan bolted onto a logo; it’s a directional promise, Inova positioning itself as the first, clearest step in a patient’s journey rather than one more intimidating destination. Gillett’s images make the case visually before a single word of copy does: a grandmother and granddaughter baking side by side, a father getting crowned with a plastic tiara by his daughter mid-tea-party, a woman catching her own thoughtful expression in a bathroom mirror. No posed clinical set dressing. Just the ordinary, unglamorous moments where health actually happens, decision, reflection, connection, treated with the visual seriousness usually reserved for lifestyle campaigns twice the budget.

That restraint is the whole strategy. Notorious111’s broader work with Inova had already identified the gap: across three years and four research waves, Inova was winning the numbers, intent-to-use up from 69% to 75%, patients willing to travel for care up from 44% to 55%, brand favorability climbing to an all-time high of 76%, while the feeling lagged behind. People weren’t yet describing the brand as genuine, compassionate, personalized. You don’t close that gap with another claims-based ad. You close it by showing people being people, and trusting the audience to feel the difference. That’s the brief Gillett’s photography answers.

It shows up down to the media plan, too,  a Metrobus wrap of a woman mid-stretch on a gym floor, simply captioned “I feel like myself again,” dropped into daily commutes instead of doctor’s-office waiting rooms. Healthcare advertising that lives where healthcare decisions actually get made: in transit, at the kitchen table, mid-argument-with-yourself about whether that thing you’ve been ignoring is worth a call.

For Unrivaled, producing “Start Here” meant delivering the infrastructure behind Gillett’s eye, casting real families instead of stock-photo ones, securing locations that read as lived-in rather than staged, and keeping a category notorious for looking fake feeling completely true. It’s the kind of production work that doesn’t announce itself, which is exactly the point: the campaign should feel less like advertising and more like a window into somebody’s actual Tuesday.

Healthcare brands spend fortunes trying to manufacture warmth. Inova, Notorious111, and Travis Gillett found it by pointing a camera at what was already there.

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