Medica, one of the largest health insurers operating in Minnesota, is showing some attitude with a new marketing campaign in the Twin Cities.

Billboards, bus stop and skyway signs show a lesbian couple holding hands, an ear with a huge stud earring, a baby holding a toy block, and a woman with a little girl lying on a blanket. The message is that Medica has “plans that fit your life.”

“We’re really trying to focus our messages to different populations,” said Dannette Coleman, Medica’s vice president and general manager of the insurer’s individual and family business.

The $250,000 advertising campaign, which started last week and runs for about three months, is a recognition on Medica’s part that more individuals are going to be buying health plans for themselves versus employers, which remain the major health plan customers. Medica and its major competitors, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota and HealthPartners, have been offering new products and services as competition heats up in the individual plan market in Minnesota and across the country.

The health reform that Congress passed last year is helping to fuel the change. That’s because it requires the previously uninsured to purchase health insurance or face a fine by 2014. Health reform also requires states to set up health insurance exchanges to make it easier for people to shop for plans. It’s also possible that some employers will stop offering coverage for workers once the exchanges are in place.

The health reform also includes many requirements on premiums, deductibles and other aspects of health plans. When it comes to the basics, most health plans will be the same, said Wayne Scott, a Minneapolis-based consultant for Mercer.

Insurers will have to promote extra services such as wellness programs to make their plans stand apart. They’ll also have to get more creative with their advertising. Medica’s Twin Cities advertisements could be a preview of what health insurance advertising will look like across the country in coming years, Scott said.

“It’s going to be much more like the gecko ads,” said Scott, referring to the talking gecko that car insurer GEICO features in many of its advertisements.

Medica itself in recent years has unveiled a family of individual plan products — called Solo, Encore and Symphony — that pair a high deductible with basic preventative care services, such as full coverage of doctor’s office visits. Solo is for individuals, Encore is for an individual plus any other person the individual wants to include on the plan, and Symphony is for entire families.

Medica boosted its individual plan membership 47 percent last year, to about 30,000, and continues to add more members, Coleman said. “We are growing incredibly fast right now. We are picking up market share from our competitors, and we’re moving forward with an aggressive strategy to maintain that growth.”

The campaign started last week in downtown St. Paul near the Xcel Energy Center, home of the Minnesota Wild professional hockey team, and will move to downtown Minneapolis next month in time for the start of the Minnesota Twins’ regular season. Advertisements are also running in local magazines such as Minnesota Monthly.

Besides the different imagery, the campaign also works QR codes into the advertisements. The codes allow smartphone users to point their phones at the codes to look up information online. In the case of the Medica advertisements, smartphone users can use the QR code in the advertisement to look up a quote.

The Minneapolis-based advertising and marketing agency Level designed the campaign.