To direct more attention toward the importance of regular breast cancer screenings, Novartis is taking to one of television’s biggest stages.
The drugmaker’s first-ever Super Bowl ad is set to air during the matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on Feb. 9. Last year’s broadcast set a record as the most-watched telecast in history, with 123.4 million average viewers.
Rather than using the massive platform to push any specific drug, Novartis—which does, for the record, sell breast cancer meds Kisqali, Piqray and Afinitor—designed the “Your Attention, Please” campaign to encourage viewers to prioritize their breast health.
“We continue to be very active in the therapeutics space, but we also asked ourselves, as a leader in this space, what else can we do?” Victor Bulto, president of Novartis US, said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
The answer was “pretty clear,” he said: Address the breast cancer diagnosis gap.
“Right now, we know that 1 in 2 women, unfortunately, don’t get their regular mammograms,” he continued. “And we also know that the best chance that they have at surviving is early diagnosis. There’s recent data that point out that early diagnosis can translate into a 99% survival rate—and honestly, that’s what we would like to achieve for every single woman.”
Another clear answer emerged when Bulto’s team began wondering how to hugely scale up the company’s work around improving breast cancer screening and early diagnosis rates: Tap into the enormous viewership of the Super Bowl.
True to its name, the resulting campaign is designed to be attention-grabbing and to “turn that attention into action,” according to Bulto. Though the full commercial is being kept under wraps until its prime-time debut, he told Fierce that it plays on the attention often given to women’s breasts in society, then “turns it on its head to basically raise attention on the need to do a much better job at diagnosis, at mammograms.”
“You will see an ad that defies the current norms of pharma advertisement because, in fact, it is not a pharma advertisement,” he said, emphasizing the ad’s goals of raising awareness about the importance of breast health and, in doing so, increasing early detection of breast cancer.
With the commercial at its center, the "Your Attention, Please" campaign will be a “surround-sound” effort, Bulto said, and includes a dedicated website filled with tools and information to help visitors learn about breast health, assess their cancer risk and plan their routine checkups.
The campaign’s important message will be further bolstered by the star power of comedian-actress Wanda Sykes and actress-musician Hailee Steinfeld, both of whom appear in the Super Bowl ad.
The selection of the two celebs—a 60-year-old breast cancer survivor and a 28-year-old mental and physical health advocate, respectively—was deliberate. As Bulto explained, while Sykes brings valuable firsthand experience with breast cancer and early detection, Steinfeld’s popularity among younger generations may inspire younger women to check their risk factors and begin recommended screenings as soon as possible, especially as breast cancer rates rise among the under-50 set.
Plus, beyond its celebrity partners, and even going beyond the campaign, Novartis is also teaming up with organizations including Susan G. Komen, Living Beyond Breast Cancer, Breastcancer.org and TOUCH, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance to boost support for community-level breast cancer advocacy initiatives and for legislation to improve access to breast imaging services.
As for why, exactly, Novartis chose this year and this effort to make its first foray into the high-profile (and high-cost) realm of Super Bowl advertisements, Bulto said the reasons were twofold.
For one, he noted, the company has “become leaders in the CDK4/6 space” thanks to Kisqali and its recently expanded label, “and we truly believe—I, personally, truly believe—that with the privilege of being a leader in a space comes also the responsibility to think, what else can we do?”
“And the second trigger was really thinking about—the debate inside the team was, how do we create a movement?” he said.
Simply putting out data and information is “not enough” to significantly improve early breast cancer diagnosis rates, according to the exec.
“And that’s why we thought big,” he said. “We thought, well, if we really want to move the needle … there’s no better platform than a Super Bowl.”
That belief was further strengthened by their realization that not only is the Super Bowl audience objectively enormous, but it’s also nearly 50% female—“so we got very excited about this opportunity, and we think this is the right cause to put this investment and these efforts around,” Bulto said.