Novo Nordisk is ramping up promotion of its weight-loss drug Wegovy. Having paused some promotions as demand swamped supply last year, the Danish drugmaker has now started running a TV spot to show the impact losing weight can have on people’s lives.
The Novo marketing team pumped the brakes on Wegovy promotional efforts in May. With social media and celebrity users hyping the GLP-1 receptor agonist, Novo stopped television advertising in the U.S. “to avoid stimulating further demand” for a product that was already in short supply. Now, the company is back with a TV ad that, unlike its earlier spot, is more about patient lives than the benefits of Wegovy.
Novo’s “Change is Never Easy” TV spot opens with a woman walking briskly through a park, followed by brief clips of a man holding a basketball with one hand and a kid with the other, and a different woman standing alone on a stage in front of an audience.
A voiceover says: “Change is never easy. There will be naysayers, doubters and critics. You may even give up for a moment, only to start again another day.” The tone then shifts, with a soaring vocal replacing the muted piano that opens the ad and clips of a woman enjoying an exercise class, a man helping a kid to learn to ride a bike and another man being measured for a new suit.
The voiceover says people start again because they “believe in moving to the beat of your own drum, passing down lifelong skills, in your ability to lose weight and keep it off.” The first part of the ad closes with the line “when you believe you can succeed, you already have.”
After the safety messages, the voiceover returns to say “keep on believing, because it's not just about the weight you lose, it's about everything you gain.” The final frame directs viewers to BelieveOn.com, a website Novo has set up to promote Wegovy.
The ad indicates Novo now sees value in promoting Wegovy, albeit with a softer sell than before. That wasn’t the case when the company was scrambling to keep up with existing interest last year. A few things have changed since then. Eli Lilly won FDA approval for its rival weight-loss medicine Zepbound, providing competition for Wegovy, and the balance between supply and demand began to shift.
Talking at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference last week, Novo CEO Lars Jørgensen said the market is “moving a bit out of the hype” phase. Jørgensen framed the shift to “very steady, robust demand” as a positive because the hype “was not easy for us to actually control ... or even be involved in it.” The modulation of demand has happened in parallel to work to increase capacity.
“I'm very comfortable looking into '24, and specifically for Wegovy and the U.S., that we can add significant additional volumes. It's a situation where we gradually scale up manufacturing, we have lines coming in. There's not one triggering event. It's a continued journey of building capacity for the years to come, but significant additional capacity for '24 for sure,” Jørgensen said.