Last year, the top winners at the prestigious Pharma Lions event at Cannes were not in fact pharma companies, and in 2023 that trend continues as a digital face-tracking app, a breast cancer inequality campaign and the sounds of dying cancer cells take the top prizes.
The overall winner of the Pharma Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on June 19 was not a drug from a pharma but rather a digital product from a little-known Brazilian company called Eurofarma, supported by the Brazil Parkinson Association and run by Argentina’s Dentsu Creative agency.
Just like last year’s overall winner, which was a digital tool to help those with motor neuron disease use their voice once their condition had progressed, Eurofarma taps digital, specifically an app that allows people with Parkinson’s disease to perform facial exercises that slow the progression of muscle atrophy with a social media twist.
In the award-winning entry, Eurofarma said that an early symptom of Parkinson’s is something called “facial masking,” or hypomimia. In essence, patients lose the ability to smile, laugh or look surprised, and their inability to express emotion severely impacts relationships, communication and quality of life.
The company found that, globally, people spend around 2.5 hours a day scrolling through social feeds and so asked the question: “What if we could convert down time to therapy time?”
From that question, “scrolling therapy” was born and works as a mobile application that uses facial recognition to browse a patient’s news feed. “We identified patient’s most important facial therapy exercises—smiling, rising eyebrows, frowning—and converted them into commands for the newsfeed,” the company said.
While taking the overall prize, there were still several other high-end winners in the Pharma category.
From the 354 entries to this year’s awards event, 12 lions (plus the Grand Prix) were awarded: two gold, four silver and six bronze lions.
However, the two golds did not go to pharma companies. The first went to The Chrysalis Initiative, an organization set up in 2019 to erase inequality in breast cancer. Its winning campaign, “Inequality You Can’t Ignore” by New York agency Eversana Intouch, aimed to show up the racial inequities in breast cancer care, an issue that especially impacts Black women.
It was a bold campaign: Geared toward healthcare providers, it combines local advertising (bus shelters right outside hospital doors), an augmented reality experience and a campaign landing page where doctors could sign up for unconscious bias training.
“We asked several hospitals to display our campaign in their lobbies; however, they all declined or dismissed the request,” the initiative said in their entry. “So, our approach changed from indoors to outdoors: we placed the campaign right outside hospital doors on bus shelters that dotted the commuting lines hospital employees were likely to travel.”
The second gold winner went to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), which also hosts every June the largest cancer conference of the year. Its campaign, “The Most Beautiful Sound,” run by New York agency Grey, is a disease awareness project that focuses on the sound of cancer cells dying.
“We translated this [sic] data into sounds patients could hear, because taking something invisible and making it tangible is a powerful healing tool,” ASCO said in their entry.
ASCO and Grey teamed up with Harvard Medical School and, using a new study, isolated cells from different cancers at the precise moment of apoptosis (cell death) to “capture its sound to help millions of people fighting cancer.”
The team then worked with the Berklee College of Music to translate these sounds, which are like a highly stressed alarm signal, into a tool as an open-sourced sound therapy available for all hospitals, universities and caregivers.
Horizon Therapeutics was the most successful pharma company, winning three silver lions for its Gout Disease Awareness project and one bronze for its gout drug Krystexxa.
FCB Health, meanwhile, won Healthcare Network of the Year, with Klick Health coming second and Publicis at third place.
On the agency side, Area 23, an IPG Health company, won Healthcare Agency of the Year, while Klick came second here, too. 21Grams, part of Real Chemistry, took the final podium place.
This was a flip of 2022, where FCB and Area23 also won the top gongs, but in reverse order: FCB won best agency, while Area23 won Healthcare Network of the Year.