• by Les Luchter , August 16, 2024

Some three weeks since the premiere of the humorous superhero movie hit “Deadpool & Wolverine,” its co-star Ryan Reynolds has debuted in a more-subdued and serious production: “More to Parkinson’s.”

“You sort of know what to expect from Parkinson’s physically, but no one warned us about the hallucinations and delusions,” says Reynolds in the :90 awareness spot about those conditions, created by his own Maximum Effort agency and running on connected TV, digital media and social media.

“Around 50% of people with Parkinson’s endure this,” Reynolds explains in the spot, which co-stars his mother as both share their experiences caring for his father, who passed away from Parkinson’s in 2015.

That was a year before the FDA approved Acadia Pharmaceuticals’ Nuplazid to treat hallucinations and delusions in Parkinson’s disease patients.

The spot ends with Reynolds directing viewers to visit MoreToParkinsons.com, where they can get more info.

Both the website and ad spot are sponsored by Acadia.

In addition to Maximum Effort handling creative, the year-long “More to Parkinson’s” campaign finds Heartbeat handling paid media and Lippe Taylor earned media, including social and influencers. The target audience, says Acadia, is caregivers, patients and healthcare providers.

More education on the hallucinations and delusion associated with Parkinson’s is needed, because while around half of Parkinson’s patients may develop these symptoms over the course of their disease, Acadia says that “up to 90% of people currently do not proactively tell their physicians about" the problem.

Acadia has run previous unbranded campaigns around the issue, such as “Yours, Truly,” launched in 2021 with StoryCorps, which invited the Parkinson’s community to share their stories about non-motor symptoms of the disease.

In 2022, the pharma company also launched Rett Revealed, a photo-sharing awareness campaign on behalf of another neurological disease, Rett syndrome. That was a year before Acadia received FDA approval for Daybue, the first drug to treat the rare disease.

Reynolds, who has long been associated with The Michael J Fox Foundation, where he serves on the board of the Parkinson’s disease nonprofit, is no stranger to health-related ad campaigns, either.

His previous efforts with Maximum Effort include the “Dollops of Polyps,” a colonoscopy show-and-tell with the Colorectal Cancer Alliance.