How to Talk to Your Doctor: Creating Great Advertising in the Pharmaceutical Industry
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How to Talk to Your Doctor: Creating Great Advertising in the Pharmaceutical Industry
- 1. How to talk to your doctor: creating great advertising in the pharmaceutical industry Philip Reynolds Palio+Ignite
- 2. The challenge: getting off the pharma bike path
- 3. The solution: insight-based advertising with some kick • Learn about your target and discover a deep insight about them • If possible, find a competitive advantage for your product • Build to a differentiating position • Execute against a single-minded idea
- 4. Emotional insight: Stribild • HIV medication launched in 2012 • Benefit: 1-pill-a-day convenience • Insight: starting HIV therapy means you’re sick, life is over • Solution: Starting Stribild means you’re starting a new, better phase of life
- 5. Stribildjournal ad • Text here
- 6. Emotional insight: Brevibloc • Intravenous heart rate agent used in hospital critical care – Requires monitoring/allows adjusting • Critical care physician needs to feel like a life- saver in command • “Minority Report” concept turns potential drawback into benefit by feeding need to be a hero in control
- 9. Being single-minded: Creon • Market-leading pill for exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (inability to digest food) • Used in wide variety of conditions and patient types, by many different kinds of physicians— can there be a unifying creative idea? • Analogy of mining equipment creates a simple icon of a hard-working, dependable brand
- 10. Creon poster
- 11. Being bold: Colcrys • Gout medicine with long history • Relaunched on news that it is packaged in a lower dose yet just as effective • Creative idea answers the question, What if you take something strong and ask it to behave a little more sensitively?
- 13. As it is in my business, so shall it be in yours • Communicate with a simple idea • Build the idea from an insight about your customer • Don’t be afraid to be different • Find your industry’s beach, and stay far away from it!
Editor's Notes
- I sell drugs. I sell them to doctors. I sell them to patients. And selling in pharma brings two particular challenges: First, it’s a highly technical field, with complicated products to talk about. Second, pharma is also highly regulated, with the FDA reviewing everything you create and imposing certain rules on us. Clients tend to be somewhat conservative and risk-averse.
- You see a lot of this kind of advertising in the medical journals, an ad depicting the patient “getting back to doing the things they enjoy,” which are limited to dancing on a beach, fishing with your grandchild, attending a graduation, and gardening. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea other than that you see it so much. That’s one reason it’s easy to get approved in the world inside the company. But there, it’s people’s job to read it. But once it gets in front of people who aren’t being paid to pay attention to it, it’s tremendously easy to ignore.
- What’s true in advertising generally is also true in pharma: At Palio+Ignite our approach is to communicate a simple idea that connects with an emotional insight about the target. You need a distinct positioning, you need a good brief.
- Stribild is an HIV medication that launched globally in 2012. The main functional benefit is the convenience of only having to take one pill a day, but the campaign that Palio+Ignite created for patients isn’t about that. Instead it worked off the insight that people often take starting HIV medicine as a defeat, that they are sick, and a new, diminished phase of life now begins. So we created a campaign that turns that notion on its ear: we showed different patients putting on a coat from the revolutionary war and striking a heroic pose. By starting treatment, this man is starting a “personal revolution.” Taking HIV medication becomes a marker for taking control of your health, and starting a new healthier phase of life.
- Brevibloc is an IV agent for slowing down a racing heart rate.It’s used in the critical care unit of a hospital. While other agents are longer-acting, Brevibloc needs to be continually checked on and adjusted as the patient’s condition changes. So what’s the insight? We learned that a critical care doctor is different from a dermatologist, say, or a gastroenterologist. Critical care doctors enjoy the feeling that they are life-saving heroic figures (and they are) who want to be in control of a dangerous situation. So knowing this, we developed a concept turned the monitoring and adjusting into a benefit by leveraging the critical care doctor’s need to be in command.
- None of this is work from my agency, but I thought it would be fun to look at some creative ideas for the two big erectile dysfunction brands to show how a unique positioning can support the creative’s ability to make an impact. On the lower left, we see an old Viagra campaign. When Viagra launched, it was all about a fantasy of making an older man feel young and energetic again. Then Cialis came along and let Viagra be about the man’s issues while they took ownership of the relationship. In Viagra ads, the woman was a conquest. In Cialis, the woman is more of a puzzle that’s tricky but fun to solve, with Cialis allowing you to play the game. This approach was so successful for Cialis that Viagra has changed its approach 180 degrees. The current Viagra campaign, which I think is brilliant, no longer promises that you will regain your youth. Now Viagra is about celebrating your age and the acquired wisdom of learning what you have to do to solve a problem.
- Exocrine pancreatic insufficiency means that your pancreas can’t produce the enzymes you need to digest food. Creon is a pill you take to replace those enzymes. The challenge for an advertiser is that many different kinds of doctors use this drug, all the way from pediatricians caring for kids with cystic fibrosis to oncologists caring for elderly patients with pancreatic cancer. Our client challenged us to come up with an idea that could work for all comers. Our solution was to not try to visualize the patient or the doctor, but instead to look at the way the drug works in the body, which is common in all cases. This really helped us find the simplicity and impact we look for, through this analogy of the drug to mining equipment.
- Our last example comes from Neall Currie and his team at Palio+Ignite. For Colcrys, they had a complex story to tell for a gout medicine. The news was that it could be given at a lower dose than before and yet still be effective. And when you can give a lower dose, you get the potential for fewer side effects. So we distilled all that into this iconic image that answers the question, What if you take something strong and ask it to behave a little more sensitively?
- Tough as ever, but a bit more refined. It was an incredibly entertaining campaign, with executions showing not just the biker, but a lumberjack doing ballroom dancing, and a professional wrestler playing cello in a string quartet.
- I hope you see how these lessons from pharma advertising apply to whatever business you market in. Communicate with a simple idea. Build from an insight about your customer, and don’t be afraid to stand out. I imagine every industry has it’s own version of the beach that so many patients in drug ads dance on. I encourage you to find your beach, then stay the hell away! Thank you.