To illustrate how the pharma marketing landscape has shifted during the pandemic, Ogilvy Health’s new chief creative officer Adam Hessel brings up a phone call he had recently with his mother.
“What do you know about remdesivir?” she asked him, referring to Gilead’s COVID-19 antiviral drug. His point was that COVID has taken once-obscure drugs and pharma companies “with weird names that you’ve never heard of before” and turned them into household names.
That’s created a golden opportunity for pharma to communicate differently than it has in the past.
He pointed to Pfizer’s recent “Will and Grit” TV spot, which aired during the NFL playoffs. The ad talks about “what we do when the chips are down” and “how adversity is best met with creativity—and kindness.”
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“They’re not selling a product. They’re just selling what their vision is to develop technology for humanity,” he said.
Of course the bread-and-butter work of any agency will always be developing marketing campaigns for brands, he said. But on top of that, there’s also more room for pharma to tell the bigger story of how their work can benefit society, especially now that more people are paying attention.
Hessel wants to make sure Ogilvy Health and its clients are seizing the moment, creatively speaking.
“Healthcare advertising is on the rise more than ever, and there’s amazing work coming out from amazing shops. It’s getting better and better and stronger and stronger and I feel like we’re only scratching the surface of it now,” he said. His goal is to make sure that Ogilvy is “up there with the best of the best.”
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He said he plans to do that by raising “the creative bar,” working to recruit and nurture the best talent and using analytics to monitor the impact of the work. He’s also looking for creative initiatives that Ogilvy can tackle as an agency. For example, he’d like to see the agency create its own public service announcement, focusing on an issue of societal impact such as health inequality.
Hessel comes to the healthcare marketing giant from a two-year stint as the creative chief for Harrison & Starr and before that served as senior vice president and creative director at GSW. Before the shift to healthcare, he spent nearly two decades on the consumer side, working for ad agencies like Publicis and Kaplan Thaler Productions.