When the magic happens

By Stefanie Nacar, head of US oncology communications for GSK.

“Put the patient first.”

It’s every pharma marketer’s favorite buzz-phrase in 2020. And why not? Patients are our real customers; they use and (hopefully) benefit from our products, and their wants and needs drive the success or failure of everything we do.

Of course, any leader can say, “Put the patient first.” But actually doing it is, well, not so simple. It’s quite easy in any business to fall into the cognitive bias of the master marketer, the belief that we know the customer’s wants and needs better than the customers themselves do. But when we cast away our egos and our assumptions and allow ourselves to learn from our customers, and use what we learn to empower them to speak for themselves … well, that’s when the magic happens.

TESARO had its first brand approved by FDA in March 2017 for the treatment of adult patients with recurrent ovarian cancer. So, learning about these patients, both individually and as a community, has been a matter of priority for us for quite a while.

What does that mean, learning about patients?

For us it meant looking them in the eye. Building relationships with advocacy groups and their leaders. Participating in advocacy and patient engagement summits. Talking with – and listening to – patients and care partners and family members. The patient’s perspective lives out there in the world, not on a spreadsheet, and so we had to go out and find it.

And what we found was inspiring. Ovarian cancer can be a devastating disease. It has the lowest survival rate of all female cancers. It strikes and can kill women of all ages and ethnicities. The symptoms are often ignored or misread, until it’s too late. But what we found in the course of our learning was that the people with this disease are profoundly motivated, supportive and positive – they want to help each other, and they want to make sure others don’t have to go through the same experience. This community was and is just bubbling with energy and power. At a patient ambassador summit in Washington, D.C., patients sang us a song they’d written about the brand. Experiences like that don’t generally show up in the pharma brand handbook. And the impact of experiences like that and others like it went far beyond business – it was personal, very personal. We were inspired by these women. And we felt a sense of obligation to them.

In the early summer of 2019 we began talking with our agency partner, Intouch Solutions, about what to do for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, which was coming up in September. The impact that our patient interactions had on all of us set the agenda. We were going to create a nonbranded awareness campaign that would speak with the voice of women in the ovarian cancer community – or, rather, let them speak with their own voices. Everything was on the table. The goal wasn’t saturation or digital conversions, it was to convert all the energy and defiance of the community into broader awareness.

And the community made our choices for us. If ever a campaign grew up from the grass roots, this was the one. The women of the ovarian cancer advocacy community are on social media, so social media would be our channel. They are of all different ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, so the beauty of all that diversity would be poured into the creative visuals of the campaign. And many of them are frustrated – frustrated that they’d misunderstood their symptoms or didn’t take them seriously sooner than they did. They could’ve acted sooner, but they hadn’t. And they wanted the next woman with nagging bloating or loss of appetite or pelvic pressure or low energy to act.

So, OvaryAct.

It was perfect.

The Intouch creative team drew inspiration for its imagery from the patient ambassadors that they’d come to know so well, aiming for each component to resonate with each ambassador. They worked to capture the brilliance, the sense of hope, the energy and strength of this community to fight for more time, to fight for more awareness, to support and connect with each other.

For our grassroots social media exercise, we decided to use a tool that hadn’t made an appearance in a pharma campaign before: GIPHY. We partnered with the site so that all the visual components could be posted as free downloads and used by patients and advocacy groups. GIPHY is a channel with a tremendous amount of reach and frequency, where users are encouraged to personalize their own content and use others’ content in the form of GIF images and animations. Pharma brands haven’t used it – and in fact might be seen as self-serving if they did. But for a nonbranded campaign focused on the patients and the relationships they have with each other, it was just right.

And we wanted to take a positive approach. A great deal of the awareness material that had circulated in the past during Ovarian Cancer Awareness month had been focused on the disease; epidemiology, number of people impacted, low survival rate. A lot of shock and awe, in other words. That’s not the sort of approach that encourages engagement and sharing – or hope, for that matter. So we took a positive, hopeful and fun approach with the imagery and messaging.

The real miracle of OvaryAct was how quickly it came together. We rallied to get all the work done and approved in exactly 26 days, just in time to launch in early September of 2019 for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month.

Then it spread. Oh, did it spread. The patients and advocacy groups took hold of the hashtag and the GIFs and it just went everywhere. Two million social media engagements, 3.1 million GIPHY impressions, 12 million total impressions. In less than four weeks. Not because we poured money into it – because we didn’t – but because patients and caregivers saw themselves in it, spoke out through it, found it empowering, wanted it to spread.

It was really just supposed to be for that one month, just for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month last year. But now there’s next Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, this coming September.

Any communications leader can say, “Put the patient first.” How often do we really keep that commitment? Not often enough. But when we do – when we take the time to become a part of a community, to listen, to learn, and to use what we’ve learned to help the community find its own voice and spread its own messages, we do good alongside doing our jobs well. “Set your heart on doing good,” the Buddha said. “Do it over and over again, and you will be filled with joy.”