• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Image from Moon Rabbit's campaign for Inbrija, a drug treating Parkinson's disease symptoms.

Look-alike ads too focused on lifestyle tropes, mentioning side effects that are “horrifying or hilarious.” That’s how Moon Rabbit's head of strategy Steve Walls and chief client officer Tina Fisher diagnose the issues in pharma/health care ads (IPAS? ineffective pharma ad syndrome?), and also suggest some remedies. Pharma & Health Insider listens in.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Pharma & Health Insider: What are most pharma campaigns doing wrong in terms of creativity?

Tina Fisher: They're falling into the trap of getting watered down, looking the same and ultimately getting lost -- very slice of life, a lot of lifestyle, a lot of ziplining, canoeing, picnics in the park. It’s really hard to differentiate.

Steve Walls: It's really easy to do the “Saturday Night Live” version: Here's someone who is sick with possibly something ridiculous. Cut to them doing something that nobody actually ever does on a beach with people.

Read a long list of potential side effects, most of which are horrifying or hilarious. Ear wax may spurt from your nostrils, you may become a nymphomaniac and a kleptomaniac at the same time, take your own virginity or whatever. And then “ask your doctor.” That's the template. And the people in the ads all look the same -- because none of them are people. They're all stock.

I spent 25 years working in other advertising categories,  where we started by assuming that nobody was interested. Whether I was selling cars, shampoo, an airline or a beer, nobody cared. So we had to get interest and earn their attention.

Pharma’s never had to do that. Say you have a new drug for multiple sclerosis. Two audiences are really interested in anything on multiple sclerosis: a doctor who reads everything that comes out, and a patient that's in every (online) forum. I don't have to earn their attention. All I have to do is give them the information because they are already motivated -- not only to watch me, but to act.

Once you just assume they're interested, you put every point you want to make in the copy. Everything else just becomes a background image. It is a brochure read aloud over a stock shot.

P&HI: Are the lookalike pharma ads not getting the information across anymore?

Walls: The sheer volume of them and how repetitive they are makes you tune out.  I think [ad ]people forget that the ads run alongside other ads. Individually, yours might not seem too terrible. But placed against eight ads that look and sound exactly the same, you've just created wallpaper.

P&HI: How can pharma overcome that and get it right?

Fisher: Understanding who you're talking to: humans. If you truly can understand what is happening, whether with your HCPs [healthcare professionals] or your consumers, and talk with them on an emotional level, that's where you get permission to tell them something that they haven't already heard or permission to engage with them.

Walls: There's no other category where emotions are so close to the surface. It’s health and life and death and families and pain and grief and anxiety: a huge well of human emotion that we just don't acknowledge.

Acknowledging that is what changes pharma ads, because right now we say there's a huge well of data that we need to take out of a clinical trial or study and put into a :60 ad.

If you start from the other side, you go, “I know these people need a drug, but what do they want from that drug? It's probably not another picnic or walk. it might be their dignity. Until we stop trying to say, “How do we get all this information into a TV ad?” and instead say, “How does this drug serve these people?,” we’ll be stuck.

P&HI: Can you name campaigns from other agencies that have gotten it right?

Fisher: "Life Models" [created by Area 23], for women with breast cancer who are about to have a mastectomy, took images from a live figure drawing class and sent them to plastic surgeons’ offices as a way to have patients be seen and feel like somebody understands what they're about to go through.

Walls: So you look at not putting on a shirt [and going flat after mastectomy] and most pharma agencies would have backed about four steps away from that because the regulations are so tight. (They’d) want to make that feel more medical, to take it to a space where nobody could be offended by it.

Companies have got boxed into what they believe they can and can't say.  So they look for the quietest middle space. And most of the copy feels as though it's written for legal - not because legal people at the company forced you there, but because all the creatives are so aware of what the guidelines are. They never go up to the line and push against them. I've never worked anywhere where creatives knew as much about. legal and regulatory as they do here in pharma.

P&HI: All those rules make it impossible to do a :30 spot, right? That's why they're almost all :60s?

Walls: Yeah. They're enormous because  I've got to give you 23 seconds of possible adverse effects.

Fisher: That's why it became so formulaic. There's only so much you can fit in.

P&HI: Can you give me examples of a Moon Rabbit campaign that doesn't fall into that trap?

Walls: Inbrija is a rescue medication for patients seven or eight years into having Parkinson's who start to get break-through symptoms: freezing, losing bladder control, unsteady gait, falls.

Our campaign was very simple. The World Parkinson's Conference in Barcelona had a giant quilt that everybody signed, and the word repeated most often was “fight.” We started to talk to the patients, and the number one therapy people do is called Ready, Steady Boxing.

Every single patient said: “What I want is the ability to say: “Not now, not today, not during this dinner, not in front of my grandkids, not at the big game. I want to be able to fight back and just have these little temporary wins.”

In our campaign, “For the “Fighters,” we went to doctors and said, “You're not using this to help people control their symptoms. It's not about avoiding falls. It's about the dignity of the fight. It's about morale. It's about keeping these people's spirits up.”

Real patients were in the ads. It's the first time they'd ever seen (other) Parkinson's patients in a Parkinson's ad. Not actors, because one of the other things they said to us was, “We see Michael J. Fox. But everybody else is playing a Parkinson's patient.”

We could have spent all of the time telling doctors that we were the fastest-acting, that inhaled worked better than an ingested pill, but the idea of giving people the dignity of the fight worked.