Why Wellhub Cloned Terry Crews for its US Brand Campaign

How do you make a corporate HR benefit look like a good time? Wellhub's answer is to hire Terry Crews, then hire him again, and again.

The corporate wellness platform, the business formerly known as Gympass, has launched its first US brand campaign, and the big idea is to fill the screen with several versions of the actor, each stretching, sparring or sprinting through a different wellness experience.

Wellhub's Chief Marketing Officer, Leandro Caldeira, casts him as more than a gym-poster figure. "He has reinvented himself and stayed motivated through all of it," he says in a statement.

"That is the mindset we want every employee to have access to, and exactly what Wellhub makes possible for companies that are ready to invest in their people the right way."

One Terry was never going to be enough

The film multiplies Terry across yoga, pickleball, running, gym floors and jiu-jitsu, all captured in a single day of shooting.

To pull it off, the crew leaned on robotic cameras precise enough to repeat a move to the millimetre, letting several Terrys share a frame without a whiff of green screen. Post-production came from AIR+ATOMO.

"I wanted the transitions to come from the body itself," says Carlão Busato, the director and  Chief Creative Officer at production house Surreal Hotel Arts. "Someone running past a gym leads us into a running scene. A jump becomes part of a dance sequence. A gesture evolves into a tennis swing."

The technology, he adds, "serves the human experience, not the other way around". 

The brief was to show Terry "integrated into these experiences rather than performing an exaggerated version of himself", a quieter register for an actor best known for his boisterous personality.

For its makers the shoot was a milestone too: the film is Surreal Hotel Arts' first US-led production and Euphoria Creative's first global campaign.

Why a benefits firm is buying the glossy stuff

Behind the fun sits a hard market. Wellhub sells employers a single membership that plugs staff into fitness, mental health, therapy, nutrition and sleep, and it is far from alone.

ClassPass, EGYM Wellpass and a scrum of rivals are chasing the same HR budgets, which makes brand, not just network size, the battleground. 

Wellhub works with more than 50,000 companies worldwide across a network of over 100,000 gyms, studios and apps, and check-ins on the platform leapt from 100 million in 2022 to a billion last year.

It also likes a number: the company says its users post 35% lower healthcare costs and 30% lower staff turnover than the norm.

Terry, named Wellhub's Global Ambassador of Wellbeing in June, is already the friendly face of the American push, buttonholing HR leaders about burnout and turning up on the SHRM mainstage. 

The real sleight of hand

Corporate wellness usually sells itself on a spreadsheet, all lower absenteeism and lower claims. Wellhub is selling belonging instead, dressed up as a man who is, gloriously, several men at once.

The message underneath the gag is that wellness is a team sport, not a solitary grind, and that there is a crew for everyone somewhere on the app.

Whether "Terry Crews' Crews" charms a CFO into signing is another matter. The people who buy corporate wellness weigh utilisation rates and cost per head, not casting choices, and a well-lit jiu-jitsu roll has never closed a procurement cycle on its own.

But that misreads the job. In a category where nearly every platform resells the same gyms and apps, the products are near-identical and brand is the last real ground to fight on. The harder trick is getting employees to want the benefit rather than tolerate it, because a membership nobody opens is a line item a finance team eventually deletes.

A campaign people enjoy watching works both ends of that: it flatters the buyer and pulls the workforce off the sofa. That is Wellhub's wager. One Terry might not have carried it. Several, apparently, can.