Coming together for Ingrezza
Coming together for Ingrezza
Jeffrey Akin, executive director of marketing for Neurocrine; Eric Densmore, senior VP, account director for AbelsonTaylor; Anne Hahn, digital marketing manager for Neurocrine; Madeline Hatton, director of brand marketing for Neurocrine; and Erica Rivera, VP of engagement strategy at AbelsonTaylor, discuss how the company and the agency collaborated on the creation of the campaign for Neurocrine’s tardive dyskinesia treatment Ingrezza.
Jeffrey Akin: Ingrezza was developed in-house. The Neurocrine organization did the raw science, took it completely through the clinical and development process, and now it’s the first FDA-approved treatment for tardive dyskinesia and our first commercial product. TD is an involuntary movement disorder prompted by the use of atypical antipsychotics. Prior to Ingrezza, physicians either ignored TD or tried to minimize it by adjusting the dose of the underlying atypical antipsychotic – though once TD starts, even the removal of the underlying cause doesn’t necessarily make it stop. Patients who were already dealing with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder had to struggle with this additional burden with little to no help from their physicians, without even knowing that these symptoms might be related to their antipsychotic treatment. Physicians weren’t asking patients about involuntary movements because they had no treatment to offer. About 600,000 people in the United States have TD. About 80 percent of them aren’t diagnosed. So our first challenge in launching a consumer-facing campaign was to educate patients, to help them see that this was something they didn’t just have to live with.
Eric Densmore: When we first heard about the opportunity to work on Ingrezza, we were really inspired. This was just the kind of brand AT loves to work on. I mean, there are an awful lot of drugs out there that help people, but very few that really make a visible difference in their lives. People with TD have nowhere to hide. Sitting on the subway, walking down the street, others are seeing them, judging them, moving away, asking embarrassing questions. Many TD patients just isolate themselves, withdraw from the world, because they don’t want to deal with the questions and the judgment. Add that to the impact of trying to deal with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. So we saw very quickly that this was an opportunity to transform lives for the better in a way that most brands just don’t offer. We would be able to help an underserved population of patients that didn’t even know anything could be done to help them.
Madeline Hatton: This was going to be the first branded campaign not just for Ingrezza but for the whole company. So we put an immense amount of effort internally into choosing the right partner. The minute AT walked in the door for the pitch we could see they understood the challenge we were facing, that they were committed to serving this patient population. They came to the table with wonderful creative ideas for the DTC campaign, some of which actually made it to the final campaign.
Jeffrey Akin: The day that AT pitched, their first five slides were all centered around this insight that 80 percent of patients don’t even know that they have the disorder or haven’t had a conversation with their doctor about it, they are so underserved, there’s such a meaningful way we can help these patients. All the agencies had that in there somewhere, but it clearly wasn’t the focus; for AT it was the entire first five minutes, and all of us on the brand team sort of looked at each other and we knew this was it. Finally, someone got it.
Eric Densmore: I was amazed at the amount of research Neurocrine had done, especially given that this was a company preparing for its first-ever DTC campaign. They knew exactly what they wanted, the effect they wanted the work to have on patients. They wanted patients to see themselves in the work and say, “That’s my movement.” But TD isn’t just one kind of movement. The mouth movement is most prevalent, but some people don’t have that; some people just have hand movements or leg movements. So we couldn’t focus on just one type of movement or we’d be missing out on a lot of patients. We had to get it just right.
Madeline Hatton: Our goal from the beginning was to empower our patients to speak to their providers about TD, to make sure they understood that this was a problem that could be solved rather than just endured. So we used market research to guide everything we did. And then we just let AT go to town with the insights from the market research, and they came up with amazing creative concepts, many of which tested quite well. Ultimately we decided to move forward with the Spotlight campaign. The metaphor was just perfect, and AT found the right way to express it visually. It spoke to our patients in that when everything seems to be going well with treatment for their underlying mental health, now the world is staring at them and putting a spotlight on them because of this other more visible condition. Our patients are just trying to get on with their lives and move forward after all the work they’ve done with their mental health to get back out to life again. The Spotlight campaign spoke to that emotion perfectly while driving awareness and action and ultimately brand recognition for Ingrezza.
Eric Densmore: I was in the room the first time the account team saw the Spotlight idea. It just felt right. It was exactly what we’d been hearing from patients – people don’t see the patient, they see the movements.
Erica Rivera: The early work we did with social listening was critically important. It just gave a different depth to our understanding of TD and TD patients. You see what makes people frustrated, when they are irritated by another’s lack of understanding. You get a behind the scenes view of what it’s really like for the patients and the caregivers in an environment of authenticity, not by asking but just by listening.
Eric Densmore: Neurocrine had a psychiatrist on their team and she was able to help us get the movements just right. As we started hiring actors, she worked with them and coached them to make those movements authentic. She was on site during the shoots, working with the actors, looking at every cut to be sure the movements were just right and we were showing a wide range of them. And you can’t just take a ruler and measure TD movements. It’s a subjective thing. In pharma we always hear a lot of criticism, especially from patient advocacy groups, that the work doesn’t really reflect the reality of the patient’s situation. The Neurocrine team was absolutely not going to allow that to happen, and we were right there with them.
Anne Hahn: Beyond developing the campaign itself, we had to make sure that it was reaching TD patients and care partners. So it was really important to develop an understanding of where they were and are. Were they engaging with media online, in person, print pubs? We needed to be sure we were meeting them at every step along their journey, whether diagnosed, undiagnosed, on treatment, not on treatment. Our research and interaction with patients drove our channel selection, with a focus on traditional TV and digital. For us it’s really about ensuring that we’re delivering that important message of education alongside a brand message helping them take that next step. We’re leveraging social this year, which is completely new for the brand – we’re leveraging Facebook and Instagram, which are helping us engage directly with TD patients, one on one.
Jeffrey Akin: I got a text message the other day from one of our sales leaders who’d just come out of a doctors’ office. The doctor had just seen a patient, a longtime patient, who’d come in after seeing the commercial and recognizing the symptoms. The patient was diagnosed with TD and prescribed Ingrezza. To me, that is our mission. That is our vision as an organization. It’s to support people in need that don’t have other options. Pharma and DTC often get a bad rap, you know? But here a patient got that little bit of education, even in the middle of a sitcom on TV, and it prompted a conversation with a doctor that led to addressing this outward representation of an inner struggle with mental health, something the patient thought was just a price of the struggle before. That’s incredible. Hearing and sharing that story as motivation and inspiration for our teams was really exciting and fulfilling. It was one small personification of what our vision had been all along.
Eric Densmore: It’s not like you flip a switch and prescriptions start getting written like you turned on a fire hose. This is a long play, and it’s a credit to Jeff and his team that they understood that, even with their very first DTC campaign. All the right indicators have been very positive so far, and we’ve heard, anecdotally, some great stories.
Erica Rivera: These patients are at different places in their journey. Some are struggling to get diagnosed. Some are pushing to get their diagnosis treated a little better, maybe a little more proactively and aggressively. What we’ve made sure to do was build out a true digital ecosystem so, as a result of seeing the ad, whatever next step that patient or caregiver decides to take, we are prepared to meet them where they are. We’re building a system so we can measure true actions and engagements that aren’t always about that top-level awareness but trying to drive them down a bit deeper and giving them the tools to take that next step. It might be, “I don’t like the way we’ve been treating my TD,” or, “This is, for sure, what I’ve been dealing with,” or anything in between, we are giving them the tools to have that conversation.
Jeffrey Akin: We are working really hard to be thoughtful and aggressive and strategic with the way we’re investing and the channels we’re using, but we’re also working with limited data. So our job is to understand all the new data we’re getting, to mine insights from the various sources of data, and then pull those back into optimizing for new creative that’ll go in market in the coming months and years. What we’ve done so far is just the beginning. Now we have to evolve the TV spots, evolve the website, evolve the social media presence based on everything we’ve learned. There’s never going to be a moment when this campaign is final. It’s our responsibility to be sure it constantly evolves to reflect the needs of TD patients, wherever in their respective journeys they might be.
Anne Hahn: Launching this huge campaign during COVID, you wouldn’t have thought that we weren’t all in an office together every day. We were seamless. The most powerful lesson I’ve taken out of this entire experience is that when the cause is just a brand team and an agency team can and will do whatever it takes to bring a campaign to life irrespective of the circumstances.
Erica Rivera: Never in a million years did I think we would win this business and then go directly into a pandemic situation and be able to achieve what we’ve achieved so far. And all that speaks directly to the relationship between the brand and agency teams. They trust us to do our jobs and we trust them to do theirs. They always want to hear what we have to say. We don’t always agree, which is fine, but sometimes it’s the disagreements that end up leading you to a better place.
Jeffrey Akin: This has been a huge first for our organization. AT delivered. They were true to their own beliefs and standards and our shared vision to support the patient. They came forward with incredible creative. They treated us as a true partner. And we’ve all worked as a single team.
Erica Rivera: Given how quickly everything had to be done plus the circumstances of the pandemic, it’s been a bit of a roller coaster with your hair on fire. Sometimes we’d start at 9 a.m. with, “Here’s what we’re going to achieve today,” and by lunchtime it’s, “Just kidding, we’re doing something different.” In that sense, Zoom and virtual tools and everyone working from their basement, the flexibility all that has engendered, has actually been a blessing. There were times when it felt scary, but it’s also been a thrill, and at the end of the day we could always laugh about the zigs and zags of the day, and we still were a team.
