Recently, three of our creative leaders at EVERSANA INTOUCH had the honor of participating in a webinar hosted by Cannes Lions, exploring the theme of “Health and the Health-Conscious Consumer.”
This insightful session featured Susan Perlbachs, Chief Creative Officer; Nick Capanear, Managing Director, Executive Creative Director; and Ivan Blotta, Group Creative Director, Head of Art. The focus of their discussion was our ongoing collaboration with Jamil Rivers and The Chrysalis Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating racial disparities in breast cancer treatment, and the intricacies of our Gold Lion award-winning campaign, “Inequality You Can’t Ignore.”
The campaign not only captured the public’s attention but also made waves within the medical community, showcasing the transformative power of creativity as a tool for advocacy. A notable challenge emerged in ensuring that this crucial information reached healthcare professionals. When initial attempts to display the campaign in doctors’ lobbies were thwarted, our team demonstrated adaptability by shifting the strategy to target healthcare practitioners, strategically placing the campaign in bus shelters along their commuting routes.
Our creative leaders delved into the details of three key components that made this an award-winning campaign: Craft, Innovation, and Human Tone.
1. Crafting Authenticity: Inspiring Our Audience to Spark Change
While the first wave of this campaign work, #EraseTheLine, was really based on the illustration, this wave was purposefully brought through in photography, utilizing self-portraits of breast cancer survivors paired with a QR code leading to an AR experience. The three women featured in our campaign: Chanel, Gloria, and Roberta were matched with the talented Black photographer, Yachin Parham, in Brooklyn to shoot the photography.
While on set, the women were each painted by a body paint artist, and their vulnerability and bravery were unmatched. We intentionally did not retouch these images in order to showcase the emotional and physical scars from the cancer experience. We wanted to capture something raw, and these women courageously allowed us to deliver that.
As Nick has always said, “No matter how great our ideas are, no matter how clever our messaging is, no matter how much customer insight we bring to the table, our campaigns live and sometimes die on how effectively they can draw in and inspire their audiences. And doing that takes craft.”
Our main goals were to not only show who the person is being affected by this devastating disease but to also show how unconscious bias among healthcare providers impacted their treatment so the authenticity of the campaign could capture our audience’s attention and inspire them to make a change.
2. Innovation: Utilizing Augmented Reality (AR) to Raise Health Awareness
EVERSANA INTOUCH has always been committed to innovation, and the focus on this campaign was no different. We introduced AR elements to help create an immersive experience for doctors to confront the jarring disparities in treatment and results among different groups of women.
The main audience for this campaign was doctors, hospital staff, and clinicians. They tend to fact-check any claim, so we needed a bold approach to raising these statistics.
Imagine a doctor walking towards his clinic and he sees a striking image with the message “How unequal is breast cancer care for Black women? Scan to find out.” “We showed just enough curiosity for doctors to want to scan to learn more,” said Ivan. “Then, we used the power of AR to amplify the statistics even more and explode out of their phones with more impactful stats. It’s such a big disparity and technology helped us showcase it in this way.”
The AR experience and the microsite encourage medical professionals to sign up for unconscious bias training, which can take a number of different forms, from online education seminars to in-person workshops.
We were not expecting the campaign to take off as it did because it was outside of hospitals, and we knew the adversity. However, we were extremely accurate in mapping out the bus shelters in the vicinity of the hospitals and commuting lines. Doctors started to see our campaign posters on their commute to work and started passing the statistics along by word of mouth. From there, unconscious bias training registration increased from clinicians.
3. Human Tone: The Power of Personal Connection
When we created this campaign, we knew we needed to humanize the cold, hard statistics of inequality and hear the stories of the people actually going through it. The human and authentic quality was the ‘gut punch’ that was needed to get people’s attention.
As pharma marketers, we know it is our responsibility to lead people to health. In fact, 70% of people say they look to brands for health advice. First, we knew we really needed to get this in front of doctors. We wanted to originally put the work in their lobbies, and to validate that they’re ignoring the issue, we went through the exercise of asking them. We were surprised, but they said no to us doing that. So, we pivoted, and we studied the commuting lines that HCPs and clinicians would likely use on their way to work. And that’s where we took the campaign.
“In many ways, the product here really is the training, but we’re not talking about what that training entails at all,” said Susan. “It’s barely mentioned, and that’s intentional because you’re not going to get people to take notice by selling the app’s benefits and features. Instead, this campaign showed the need for that product and there’s something more powerful in that. A lot of clients don’t get that. They want to just focus on selling the brand. The “why” is what’s truly going to move people.”
Interested in working with us to create the next breakthrough campaign for your brand? Contact us.