AbbVie is airing its first TV commercial for its eye drop Vuity four months after its FDA approval and the focus is—well, focus.
The eye drop can help improve eyesight and eliminate the need for glasses or lenses, specifically for people with the blurry near vision that comes with aging. It is the first FDA-approved drop of its kind to do so. AbbVie, which knows a thing or two about plugging brands in ads, has gone all-in on this unique selling point.
“Wait, what?” says the stunned actress when a narrator intones Vuity's abilities, and the background music stops. “It sounded like you said there was an eye drop that may help you see up close?” The narrator replies, “I did.”
The same bit is repeated several times in the 30-second spot as multiple people stop the narrator to check that they really can stop wearing glasses or contact lenses to read, and use a drop instead.
The ad goes heavy on branding, showing Vuity's branded bottle as the opening image and again halfway through the ad. The commercial began airing earlier this month, and AbbVie has already spent $5.8 million on the ad, according to real-time TV ad tracker iSpot.TV, with more than 1,600 airings so far.
In November last year, the FDA greenlighted AbbVie’s Vuity for presbyopia, making the once-daily pilocarpine solution the first eye drop for the common eye condition. Pilocarpine is already used to treat high pressure inside the eye caused by glaucoma or other eye diseases.
AbbVie, which nabbed the therapy via its Allergan buyout, uses a technology dubbed pHast, which allows Vuity to rapidly adjust to the pH of the eye's tear film.
The drug has been shown to improve close-up vision within 15 minutes of taking the eyedrops, with a duration of effect of around six hours.
The FDA go-ahead has opened up a large market, where 128 million Americans, mainly above the age of 40, who suffer from e presbyopia. The drug costs $80 a month, and AbbVie is hoping it can carve out a new market.
But while Vuity is the first to market, it does already have competition nipping at its heels. Pilocarpine-based treatments from Orasis Pharma and Eyenovia are moving through their R&D pipelines, and a pilocarpine/phentolamine combination is in development at Ocuphire Pharma. All of the candidates are now in phase 3 development.
Eyenovia's product uses the company’s Optejet dispenser to deliver small doses of pilocarpine. The device allows more consistent doses at about a fifth the drug volume of a traditional eye drop, according to the company.
Novartis, meanwhile, is doing something very different with its candidate UNR844 (lipoic acid/choline ester chloride), which it snapped up in a 2017 buyout of Encore Vision. That drug is designed to work by restoring the elasticity of the eye's own lens.
AbbVie has consistently been a big spender with its TV ad campaigns, notably on its now-aging immunology blockbuster Humira, which topped the pharma drug ad spending charts in recent years. In 2021, however, it was displaced by Sanofi and Regeneron’s immunology challenger Dupixent.