ViiV Healthcare tapped real patients to help drill down into Dovato’s unique selling point to help promote the HIV drug—and it took that message far and wide with a boost in TV ad spending during Pride Month in June.
The ad is bright and sunny, with an upbeat musical accompaniment, and it's led by patients living with HIV.
The focus is on keeping patients' HIV down to undetectable levels but with fewer medicines. HIV patients have had to take a whole host of drugs to keep the disease at bay, and they were forced to change regimens if their current combos stopped working.
In the ad, ViiV sets Dovato up as a key drug to switch to: “No other complete HIV pill uses fewer medicines to help keep you undetectable than Dovato.”
It features Jovon, a young Black man and HIV patient, who switched to Dovato. Ann, an older woman and an author who also switched to Dovato, talks up the dual-drug advantage. While many HIV pills have three or four medicines, she says, Dovato “is just as effective with two,” playing on the fact that many patients want to take as few medicines as possible. In spotlighting an older white woman as an HIV patient spokesperson, the ad challenges viewer expectations.
The third and final HIV patient spokesperson is Armando, a Hispanic man described as a foodie who's shown hosting a dinner at his house.
It’s a long commercial, at 90 seconds, with much of the time taken up with the narrator listing potential side effects and potential reactions with other drugs and conditions.
ViiV spent $8.3 million across all of its TV ads in June, according to the latest data from the real-time TV ad trackers at iSpot.tv, with the majority of this going to "Detect This."
That spend put Dovato in the top 10 pharma TV ad spenders last month—unusually for it and for any HIV drug. It came in seventh place across the entire industry.
Dovato was approved by the FDA in 2019 and made 787 million pounds sterling ($940 million) last year, as recorded under GSK, which owns the majority of ViiV. Pfizer and Shionogi are shareholders.
In December last year, the FDA approved GSK and ViiV’s Apretude, or cabotegravir, as the first long-acting injected PrEP option, which can help prevent HIV. Last January, Cabenuva was also approved as an HIV treatment, and GSK estimates the cabotegravir franchise could top 2 billion pounds ($2.7 billion) in sales in 2026.
ViiV, which is consistently ranked as the most reputable pharma company and one most focused on social and diversity issues, ran a new campaign at the start of the year looking to dispel the myths and break the stigma of HIV.
In recognition of World AIDS Day in January and as part of ViiV's "HIV in View" campaign, the pharma released a new international survey showing that even with all the progress in treatment and prevention of HIV—including the U=U concept, (Undetectable = Untransmittable)—negative and inaccurate impressions are still prevalent among the general public.