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We haven’t posted in a couple weeks, and wanted to do a quick piece on our three favorite healthcare advertising campaigns of the year. These campaigns excelled in their technological innovation, creative thinking, and willingness to breathe new life into personal promotion. If you have a favorite that you want to share, let us know in the comments!
Shingrix Personalized HCP Advertising
Healthcare Marketing & Advertising Teams:
GlaxoSmithKline, DMD Marketing, MRM-McCann & CMI/Compas
Product/Idea Being Promoted:
Shingrix (shingles vaccine)
Problem Faced:
Lack of HCP awareness of the product
Insights:
HCPs need personalized messaging
Primary Tactic:
Created customer journeys based on DMD healthcare data, first-party metrics, and marketing automation
Why We Liked It:
The campaign addressed the HCP needs for personalized, data-driven information that we talked about in our article on non-personal promotion. The team used DMD’s healthcare data to engage its audience initially, but then moved to using first-party data and marketing automation to re-engage users with subsequent messages. The use of marketing automation triggers and behavioral analytics allowed the campaign to follow-up with users—likely by using behavioral and engagement triggers like push notifications and triggered emails (#4 in the article).
The key to leveraging this sort of strategy on a daily basis is organizational communication and support. Direct contact between analytics teams, content writers, and media planners is essential when leveraging first-party insights. Combining data collected from triggered emails and desktop notifications is only effective if you can keep tabs on how leads are being nurtured and are able to react as a team when new content is needed.
The parties involved showed that delivering the right content on the right channel can reliably bring targets back. According to MM&M, the campaign earned more than two visits from 66% of HCPs who engaged with the program.
Epidiolex’s VR Sales Rep Marketing Tool
Healthcare Marketing & Advertising Teams:
Greenwich Biosciences & The Bloc
Product/Idea Being Promoted:
Epidiolex—the first FDA-approved CBD formulation that treats rare forms of epilepsy
Problem Faced:
The medical marijuana stigma and the perception of parity among treatment options
Insights:
HCPs viewed CBD as a treatment option whose quality does not depend on the manufacturer
Primary Tactic:
Created a VR experience that shows HCPs the facility Epidiolex is made, the manufacturing process, and how they can be confident in Epidiolex
Why We Liked It:
Let me first say, ‘Called it!’. When I interviewed Road to VR CEO Ben Lang in 2017, we talked about how VR is capable of being used as a sales rep tool. Kudos to Greenwich Biosciences for committing to this strategy. The newness of the CBD industry and the sources of its treatments has understandably left HCPs without answers to basic questions.
VR was able to answer basic questions like “How is your product different?” with a full-body journey that takes HCPs from the production of Epidiolex to its packaging. The experience convinced HCPs that all CBD is not created equal, and Greenwich was so thrilled with the positive response that it has armed all of its sales reps with VR headsets. The company is now employing VR as a full-fledged sales aid.
Acadia Pharma and CDM also used VR technology to great effect in 2019 as well—they produced a ‘Swarm’ a VR experience that placed conference attendees in the shoes of Parkinson’s disease psychosis sufferers. The campaign succeeded in causing a majority of participants to move PDP to the top of their list of Parkinson’s comorbidity issues that need to be addressed.
The Rape Tax
Healthcare Marketing & Advertising Teams:
The National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA) & Area 23
Product/Idea Being Promoted:
NOVA and its mitigation of rape victim medical fees
Problem Faced:
- Reticence of rape victims to report crime, seek treatment, and the lack of awareness of their medical fees
- Insights: In addition to the trauma of the experience, most rape victims pay an average of $1,000 in medical fees. Most rape victims seek help online rather than seeking treatment and having personal conversations
Primary Tactic:
User-created medical bills from their own experiences.
Why We Liked It:
At bfw Life Sciences, we appreciate when marketers can turn insights into a simple truth. The stopping power of the term ‘Rape Tax’, converting individual stories into fake medical bills, and the cold feeling of RapeTax.com flipped the traditional human-focused narrative on its head.
The results were definitely impressive: the campaign generated a 60% increase in call volume and a 40% increase in site traffic. These numbers show that even campaigns with ordinary media strategies can produce staggering results if they are given simple and powerful assets.
See More of Yourself
Otezla’s© campaign didn’t win any awards, and didn’t make our list because of innovation. We liked the campaign for the genius of its tagline: ‘See more of yourself’. The simple phrase describes the lives of sufferers of Chrohn’s disease and psoriasis. Sufferers of both of these diseases can have their lives interrupted by their condition at inconvenient moments, and might feel like they’re being held back from seeing themselves—figuratively (in action), and literally (hidden away).
Chrohn’s sufferers can find themselves stuck behind a bathroom door at a bar on Saturday night. Psoriasis sufferers might find themselves hiding out in their room—without even making it out with their friends on Saturday night because of a flare-up. But both will inevitably have their lives sidetracked at the worst times.
Besides the obvious brand benefits of a consistent message, the ability to use the same tagline throughout media placements saves a lot of time and money that would otherwise go toward making one statement work for Chrohn’s advertisements and one statement work for psoriasis advertisements. It’s a simple piece of copywriting that Otezla’s© competitors are probably kicking themselves for not thinking of.