Madrigal Pharmaceuticals broke new ground earlier this year as its Rezdiffra became the first drug approved by the FDA to treat metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). Now, with its first marketing campaign for the drug, the company is hoping to direct patients toward that newly paved pathway.
The “Way Forward” campaign went live last month in a multipronged approach, Kristin Bucklen, Madrigal’s vice president of patient marketing, told Fierce Pharma Marketing in an interview. Key to the ad push are digital channels like social media, paid search and connected TV, per Bucklen, who noted that those channels “allow us the ability to target in the most precise way, aligned with our overall brand strategy.”
Madrigal has also planned a “significant” point-of-care presence in specialists’ offices, she said, while an accompanying campaign website is decked out with information about both Rezdiffra and MASH. The site also offers patient resources like links to support groups, details about access to the drug and downloadable guides to help facilitate discussions with doctors either before or after a diagnosis of MASH, which was previously known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).
“Our intention is to educate and engage with patients and get them to go to their liver specialist to talk about liver scarring and, ultimately, find out if Rezdiffra is right for them,” Bucklen said.
To that end, Madrigal will be measuring the success of the campaign not only through the number of Rezdiffra prescriptions written for eligible patients but also through “soft leading indicator measures around activity and engagement,” she explained.
The Way Forward campaign was more than a year in the making: Initial market research began in July 2023, according to Bucklen, followed by several more rounds of research “in order to ensure that the campaign could best resonate with our target audience and really come to life, not just in still or flat images, but through video as well, so that we could best connect with our target NASH patients.”
The resulting commercials highlight multiple patient experiences. In one, a man shares, “I thought I had fatty liver disease, but it’s actually NASH, and it’s scarring my liver.” In another, a woman says, “I have NASH, a serious form of fatty liver disease that’s scarring my liver. I was doing all I could, and it wasn’t enough.”
Both minute-long ads go on to provide information about Rezdiffra, which is approved to treat MASH with moderate to severe liver scarring and without cirrhosis and which works in the liver to reduce both scarring and MASH, according to a voice-over. They close with the ads’ main characters surrounded by loved ones—the man, a high-school football coach, accepting praise on the field, and the woman sitting down to a family meal—and telling the camera they’ve found their “way forward.”
The commercials and additional imagery on the campaign site all feature painted portraits of the patients. The idea for that theme came out of Madrigal’s conversations with MASH patients throughout the market research process, Bucklen said.
“What patients told us that they were looking for with a NASH medication was this sense of control and strength and confidence, and the fact that they wanted to have that for themselves. And so the idea was, they’re painting their own portraits, so to speak,” she said.
“And then, as we continued to talk to patients and work through how we could make that come to life through video, what they shared was the reason that they wanted this control and this strength was ultimately so that they could do the things that they love with the people that they love,” she continued. “So our intention, whether it’s in a static media form or through video, is to be able to capture all of that.”
Bucklen said the campaign is targeting two core patient groups, as reflected in the pair of commercials. For one, Madrigal is aiming to reach people who have been diagnosed with MASH and are under the care of a specialist, “who are already doing all that they can but have told us that they felt stuck,” she said. For those patients, “the intention is to let them know that Rezdiffra is here, and that now they have a way forward that they never had before.”
The other group includes individuals who are unaware that their fatty liver disease has progressed into MASH. That can happen for a variety of reasons, Bucklen said, including that some patients simply may not “connect with that diagnosis or those words of NASH when the physician shared it with them, and they connected more with this idea of ‘it’s just a fatty liver.’” In other cases, she said, some doctors have told Madrigal that, before Rezdiffra’s approval, “they didn’t actually tell the patient that they had NASH or even go ahead with an actual diagnosis, in the absence of a medication.”
The targeted promos arrive shortly after Madrigal reported a promising start to Rezdiffra sales. In the second quarter of the year, the drug’s first full quarter on the market, Rezdiffra brought in $14.6 million—nearly triple consensus expectations—and counted about 2,000 patients so far, though analysts suggested at the time that the drug may encounter “some bumpiness” as the year goes on.