A “voice bank” for motor neuron disease patients losing their voices and a mosquito coil to stop the spread of malaria in outdoor spaces in India. Those were the unlikely two Grand Prix winners of the Pharma and Health & Wellness Cannes Lions awards this week.
The wins show how much healthcare marketing is moving away from a purely creative focus. Now, there is more of a focus on the patient, the impact the product can make in the real world and the need to work with multiple partners.
“Patients weren’t really talked about five years ago [at Cannes Lions]” explained Claire Gillis, CEO of VMLY&R Health, part of the agency behind the Cannes Lions wins. “Health wasn’t even really talked about five years ago."
The winning campaign for the Pharma award, handed out Monday night, was created by VMLY&R New York on behalf of Dell Technologies and Intel in partnership with Rolls-Royce and the MND Association. To have something so emotive and practical win shows how health and the patient have now become genuine in healthcare marketing, and for the judges at Cannes Lions.
The campaign, known as "I Will Always Be Me," focuses on motor neuron disease (MND)—specifically on the disease’s cruel way of stealing patients’ voices. Tech giants Dell and Intel and luxury car maker Rolls-Royce teamed up to engineer a “voice bank” that can create a digital copy of a patient’s voice so they can still sound like themselves even after losing their ability to speak normally.
The patients' voices are banked by them reading a short book that hits all the right words and notes to capture their voice digitally for the future. The agency also created a documentary showing a group of people with MND and their families as they experience the book and voice banking for the first time. This shows the very real effect on patients; they are delighted and highly emotional to hear their voices back for the first time, showing how this technology puts the patient first.
It may not be a drug or a curative treatment, but its ability to restore a lost voice is the highest example of patient-centricity because these patients want to remain as close to their former selves as possible.
It ad win also shows the need for a multi-disciplinary approach. “Neither of these [Grand Prix winning] campaigns would have won five years ago. In fact, I don’t think they would have even been created. What we are seeing, and my sense of that here [at Cannes], is that multi-disciplinary teams are coming together with a focus. So, tech with creativity, with strategy and with innovation are converging and saying ‘what can we create?’”
This is true of Dell, Intel, Rolls-Royce and the MND Association, which all worked together to create the tech and to understand the need behind it for the voice banking project.
It may seem strange that a Pharma award went to two tech companies and a luxury car maker. Gillis said it was “thrilling” that it wasn’t just pharma or healthcare but a combination of tech and patient focus that won through in the end.
“What wins is that multidisciplinary approach,” she said. Pharma companies are probably being conservative and not pushing the advertising boundaries because of the regulations they exit under, though it could be more that pharma are not being quite as punchy in their campaigns as they could be, a marketing expert added.
Pharma also has bigger risks attached to it. If it wanted to put a drug campaign up for an award, Gillis said it takes about two years to start the process to get to a potentially award-winning campaign started. That drug might be in late-stage testing or recently approved, but could then fail in a key trial and be pulled from testing, or if approved, could even be yanked from the market.
Tech solutions in health, like the voicebank, are less risky propositions and can exist under less strict regulations and are therefore a better bet for these sorts of awards.
We also saw this with VMLY&R's second win in the Health & Wellness category for its ultra-low tech mosquito coil, which was managed by VMLY&R India. Most efforts to stop mosquitoes and the malaria they can carry are focused indoors. But Maxx Flash’s “Killer Pack” is a biodegradable packaged coil that can be left outside in garbage collection points, which are major breeding grounds for malaria
The pack has a 5% active probiotic bacillus thuringiensis, which kills mosquito larvae when disposed of in garbage dumps, dustbins and stagnant water. “This was a human-centric product,” Gillis said and one for a disease that too often gets overlooked in the West.
The WHO’s World Malaria Report from last year estimates that there were 241 million malaria cases including 627,000 deaths worldwide in 2020, which represents around 14 million more cases and 69,000 more deaths than 2019.
“The idea of throwing this kind of pack into the garbage seems so obvious now, but it needed a different way of looking to make it happen,” Gillis said.
The lingering societal impact of COVID may have also have had an impact, as both health and being a patient has become “woven” into the fabric of our collective thoughts these past two years, Gillis said. Whereas five or 10 years ago a campaign may have won solely on its creativity, now judges are also looking at what the product itself can do for patients.