Klick Health’s “The Bridge,” for Paws NY, is one example of a health and wellness campaign that has enjoyed breakout success at mainstream awards shows in recent years.
When the One Club for Creativity published their international independent agency rankings last month, there was something of a pleasant surprise on tap for independent health and life sciences agency Klick, which landed fourth overall on the list.
In fact, the agency had a big weekend in New York, claiming mainstream marketing awards at both the ADCs and the One Show – 5 Gold Cubes and 4 Gold Pencils, to be exact. That success followed a breakout at the Clios, where Klick received eight awards. Klick also found success internationally at D&AD in London, where it won an additional four pencils. With a headcount of nearly 1,000 in Canada (and 1,500 internationally), the agency is one of the largest in Canada, but its work had largely been overlooked in mainstream awards programs.
That has changed this year as mainstream advertisers increasingly wade into the health and wellness space, while shops traditionally known for health and life sciences are increasingly drawing newfound attention.
“It’s been happening slowly for the past five, six, or seven years,” explains Rich Levy (pictured), CCO at Klick. “You’ve been seeing mainstream advertisers – some of the biggest in the world – slowly starting to produce more health-related messages. I think what really propelled it forward was the pandemic, because all of a sudden, health was at the forefront of everyone’s mind and everyone was talking about it. It didn’t really matter what kind of car you drove or shoes you wore. If you didn’t have your health, you didn’t have anything.”
Looking at some recent Canadian success stories on the awards circuit, it’s not hard to spot the trend. Outside of Klick’s recent awards success, at Cannes in 2022, FCB Canada’s “Mindsets Paper” campaign for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS) was the latest work between the two to receive some love in the Health and Wellness categories, but it also received shortlist nominations in innovation and engagement. Mainstream brands such as Petro-Canada and Cheekbone Beauty have seen awards success with health and wellness oriented campaigns like “24 Hours of Care” and “Glossed Over,” respectively.
The trend stretches beyond the Canadian border, too. In fact, one of Levy’s favourite examples in recent years – and a 2022 Cannes winner – is Dell Technologies’ “I Will Always Be Me,” a campaign focused on voice banking technology it had developed for ALS patients. Working with a writer, the brand developed a book that – once patients had read it in full – would provide a computer with all of the word, syllable and consonant sounds it needed to accurately reproduce their voice, “banking” it so that they could speak through the machine when they lost the ability to speak themselves.
“Things like this never would have been done [by mainstream brands] several years ago,” Levy says.
For Levy, the shattering of the divide between health and mainstream marketing stems largely from the “universal truth” that marketers seek out when developing campaigns.
“Marketers are usually inventing some sort of drama or need in the world – some injustice. But that is built into the idea of healthcare. There are already injustices in the world: a disease that afflicts the most innocent of children, or that disproportionately impacts specific, underserved populations. There’s always something happening in healthcare – some wrong that needs to be fixed – and there is always the desire to fight back when people see that injustice,” he explains. “The story is already there, and our job as advertisers is to tell it in a compelling way. We don’t have to make anything up, we just have to uncover and hold a flashlight to it.”
Dorothy Czylyski (pictured), president at NFA Health, agrees with Levy’s assessment that the pandemic “changed” people – specifically, “how we think about and experience health in general.”
“People are much more hyper-focused on what their experience is with health, and also much more open to talking about it with others. That has been a big thing in recent years,” she adds. “Having an illness or disease is very personal. Mental health is very personal. People will choose whether to share or not. We’ve been encouraging people to share and talk about their experience, and since COVID that has come out a bit more and people are willing to share their experience.”
That openness and willingness on behalf of ordinary people to share their experiences has also shifted the point of view for brands, Czylyski notes.
“Even at Cannes, there’s a lot of focus on purpose of the work being done,” she says. “Healthcare and pharma for sure has a lot of purpose. There’s a deep sense of meaning and purpose is naturally imbued into the work, whether you’re a patient or healthcare professional. So the marketing naturally has meaning and is impactful to the patient experience, much more so than if you’re advertising a car or a beer.”
“At the end of the day, if it’s another cookie or laundry detergent, you can advertise it and say what’s good about it and people will buy it. But if you’re talking about a drug or health education, it can be life-changing for a lot of people. Sometimes, it’s a matter of life and death,” Czylyski adds. “A lot of the brands we work on are in specialty areas, like the oncology area. Some of the patients we produce material for are going through an experience that is a matter of life and death. So there’s a lot more meaning and sensitivity we need to put into that work because of the impact it will have on that person. And so the renewed focus on purpose fits very nicely with where healthcare has been all along.”
Of course, entering into the health and wellness – and, even more so, pharma – spaces is not easy. For one thing, pharma marketing is saddled with far more regulations and restrictions in the claims that can be made and the messages put forward, even more than in health and wellness. These restraints often translate to less mainstream attention and awards success for pharma campaigns than for health and wellness, Czylyski says, but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t meaningful; in some cases, for some patients, it can be about life and death.
For those agencies and brands that are considering taking a shot at marketing in these spaces, Levy has a few words of advice.
“So many people are entering this space and creating work that raises awareness of something, but that’s not enough. You actually have to get people to do something – to provoke action,” he says. “There are a lot of people who understand that smoking is bad for your health, but until people stopped smoking, you couldn’t change outcomes.”
