• by Les Luchter , 5 hours ago

 
Today in the San Francisco Bay area, “there are hundreds of biotech companies, but it wasn’t always like this,” Genentech CEO Ashley Magargee notes in “The Impossible Bet,” a free half-hour documentary that premiered online on Tuesday

That all changed in 1976.

Marking the 50^th anniversary of the company and hence the biotech industry itself, Genentech (short for “genetic engineering technology”) teamed up with T Brand, the New York Times’ advertising content studio, for the film.  

“The Impossible Bet” uses patient stories to help tell Genentech’s  story -- from its breakthrough development of human insulin (now Eli Lilly’s Humulin), through its game-changing HER 2 breast cancer treatment Herceptin, to current pipeline work in obesity meds.

While biochemist Herb Boyer, one of Genentech’s two co-founders, appears in the film only via archive photos and interviews, his daughter Max – who has multiple sclerosis, for which Genentech has developed a drug that reduces the disease’s progression into disability -- is one of several patients interviewed for the film.

Not that Boyer himself couldn’t have been seen in a new interview.  He’s still  “very vibrant” at 90 years old, Tracy Furey, Genentech’s head of corporate communications, tells Marketing Daily. During a disco party celebrating the 50^th anniversary earlier this year,  “he was out on that dance floor dancing.”

While the film is partly targeted to traditional Genentech audiences like healthcare professionals and academic researchers, Furey says that Genentech now hopes to also reach a broader “general population” audience as it starts moving into obesity treatments and other fields that lend themselves to direct-to-consumer selling.

Genentech had already been rebranding to more of a consumer focus as part of its 50^th anniversary activities, running corporate image, patient-focused commercials like this one and this one.

It also put up 50^th anniversary billboards around San Francisco in January, coinciding with the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference held there, and has launched another out-of-home (OOH) campaign this week in Times Square, featuring Genentech patients who are also celebrating their 50^th birthdays.   Genentech’s ad agency is Omnicom’s BBDO.

The New York OOH effort is timed to coincide with the launch of the documentary, which is itself being promoted by T Brand through a full-page print ad in The New York Times, video ads, placements on the nytimes.com homepage and on article pages, and social media amplification.

Other Genentech 50^th anniversary activities have included a traveling museum, with a recent destination being Washington DC, where the company teamed up with Axios for an event with policymakers and elected officials.

Genentech, whose tagline is “the original biotech company,” has been owned by Roche since a $47 billion acquisition in 2009.