Making a creative pharma campaign that earns recognition at the prestigious Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is a beast. Gilead Sciences conquered the task with the help of some AI-generated animals, a touch of humor and a staunch understanding of the community it has long served.
The company’s Canadian affiliate, Gilead Canada, and Toronto-based creative agency The Local Collective (TLC), came away from last month’s Cannes Pharma Lions awards with a bronze for its “Animal Attraction” Descovy spot. The ad, which launched in Canada last year, sees a realistic-looking bear holding a smaller otter close while a funky tune plays in the background. The animal duo slightly sways in a flowing river next to the Descovy logo and on-screen text that reads “it’s wild out there.”
“Ask your doctor,” the campaign also reads, above smaller text that says “not intended for animal use, even fake ones like these.”
“Animal Attraction” is ultimately rooted in a deep understanding of the audience that Gilead has earned over decades of serving the HIV market. In promoting HIV prevention and treatment pill Descovy, the company looked to reach its patient group “in a way that felt specific, culturally fluent and relevant to their lives,” Melissa Piccinnni, director of marketing at Gilead Canada, explained in an emailed statement, using “humor, community insight and distinctive visual storytelling to encourage more open conversations about prevention.”
People with HIV don’t need explainers on the disease and its treatments as they’re already engaged, informed and “incredibly educated in the science,” TLC co-founder and chief creative officer Matt Litzinger told Fierce Pharma Marketing.
“Pharma advertising often defaults to being overly explanatory. It wants to make sure everyone understands everything,” Litzinger said.
But perhaps the beauty of “Animal Attraction” is that it’s not for everybody to understand.
Those in the community that Descovy serves will likely recognize “bear” and “otter” immediately as commonly used slang terms referring to specific male body types. Several other terms describing men within the same animal kingdom umbrella exist as well, and TLC explored multiple different potential animal combinations before landing on the bear and the otter as a “really strong starting point” due to their familiarity within the community.
“For the people who know, they know,” as Litzinger put it.
“There is a lot of complexity out there, but the campaign does not treat the audience like a problem to be solved,” he said. “It treats them as culturally fluent, funny, self-aware people.”
The tagline “it’s wild out there” also takes on a double meaning, applying to both the animal motif and the realities of dating and intimacy in today’s evolving culture, Litzinger explained.
Gilead, as the first company to bring a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medicine for HIV to market in 2012, has blazed out a path of its own for HIV drug marketing and advertisements.
Although Truvada, the world’s first PrEP, was approved for preventive use in 2012, it wasn’t until the general controversy and apprehension toward the existence of PrEP in its early days began to wane that the company began promotional activities for the indication in 2016. Truvada’s successor Descovy later won approval as a treatment in 2016 and as a PrEP in 2019, with Gilead debuting its Descovy for PrEP marketing in 2020.
“Animal Attraction” does not endorse Descovy for any specific indication, whether as an HIV treatment or a PrEP, but the cheeky humor harnessed in the campaign suggests that Gilead’s journey in HIV drug marketing is continually evolving alongside the community and its culture.
“It is not enough anymore to simply include a community in the work,” Litzinger said. “The work has to understand how that community speaks, jokes, celebrates and connects.”
AI on the Cannes stage
AI was a prominent focus at this year’s Cannes, and Gilead’s bronze-winning ad was no exception. To prepare for the continuing rise of AI after controversy and concerns abounded last year, Cannes Lions created a new “AI Integrity Handbook” laying out its framework geared toward “protecting trust, creative legitimacy and transparency,” Cannes Lions said in a statement announcing the rules last year.
Given that one would be hard-pressed to find, and shoot an image of, apex predator bears and oft-prey otters embracing in the wild, TLC turned to AI to help “build a world we could not have created as richly or as realistically through traditional illustration alone,” Litzinger said.
Although AI helped to “elevate the final execution of the idea,” the campaign was still led by “human judgment and craft,” he emphasized.
While AI-assisted ads are making a newer debut on the Cannes podium, pharma itself is a returning favorite. Last year, Viatris broke through the trend of tech-focused companies winning the top awards at the Pharma Lions festival, with Novartis, Gilead and others solidifying pharma’s big return at the 2026 awards showing.
Pharma has “not always had an easy relationship” with creativity, Litzinger pointed out, based in part on the rules and requirements that pharma advertising mandates. When pharma work is awarded at Cannes, “it is not because the category suddenly became easier, it's because the idea found a way to be brave inside the constraints,” he said. The bronze-winning Gilead campaign, as Litzinger explained, proves that pharma can have its cake and eat it too as the industry ultimately “does not need to choose between responsibility and relevance.”
Gilead, for its part, is “proud that Cannes Lions recognized the innovative approach behind this Canadian campaign and the creativity, discipline and cultural understanding it took to bring it to life,” Piccininni said, adding that the work “resisted being broad for the sake of being safe, and instead trusted the language, humor and cultural signals of a specific audience.”