Role: Consultant Creative Lead
Brief / Mission: Create a social campaign to raise awareness of incurable lung disease COPD on World COPD Day
Duration: 4 months
COPD is an incurable lung disease which is the fourth most common cause of death worldwide, with an estimated 200 million diagnosed, and some say equal that amount undiagnosed. I had never heard of the disease myself either, but once I began asking around I began to realise it affected many people. Members of my own family had died of COPD or were affected by it today, awareness of such diseases should be much higher. It was our job to do that.
A brief from TEVA Pharmaceuticals to Havas Lynx, a leading global healthcare communications group, was to devise a creative campaign through social media to raise awareness of COPD. As always the same words were spoken at me in the briefing, we want an ice bucket challenge, I am sure you do, shall we follow that up with a Harlem Shake too? Joking aside, I believed we could raise huge awareness of the disease.
Leading the in-house creative team at Havas Lynx we brainstormed ideas of how this would work, I brought the team i was working with up to speed on how to create in the digital world, creating with new-media creators builds in distribution to the content.
We had a nice idea called #Laugh4Lungs - on World COPD Day we would ask people all over the world to make someone laugh and film it, before uploading it to their favoured social network. To kickstart it we would work with several creators to who would make someone laugh and upload it to their channels with an established audience and encourage people to do the same. The pitch was signed off and we were underway! We partnered with several global respiratory charities such as the British Lung Foundation to enable extra reach and encourage people to donate to the charities involved in the campaign.
I identified a list of global creators for Havas / and TEVA to choose from managing the entire process from the creator side. Leading on negotiating and working out the creative obligations of the creators contract, before briefing creators who were signed off. My relationships with creators and agents enabled us to speak with many who wouldn’t normally be open to such a campaign.
I managed the production process of the creators content, working with them to create their original idea and who they would make laugh, often scripting or working on the flow of the content, produced some of the videos and led on the content publishing process. The strategy was to release content one week before World COPD day to raise awareness of the disease and the upcoming national day, that the creator was taking part and they should too.
Managing the process between Havas and the creators on World COPD Day, ensuring all content and contractual obligations were implemented on the day. The process of dealing with talent who are all over the world and coordinating the communications was no mean feat.
This was the first campaign of its kind in the pharmaceutical industry and was seen as a success by Havas and TEVA. We reached over 10 million people, over 50,000 interactions, and hundreds of videos created. Not a huge amount of people made videos or donated, I believe this could be due to the campaign asking one to many things, but it reached people and connected with patients of the disease and their families. The thing that struck me was the comments on the videos, the affinity the people commenting had with the creator and the all round love and appreciation really made this campaign feel like a damn good thing to do!