With broadcast TV, digital, and OOH – and even an original anthem track – Invokana became a name patients remembered and asked their doctors about.
In Pharma, data is everywhere and campaigns are abundant. What’s rarer are insights that actually shift behaviour and deliver impact. And that task has only become tougher as trust erodes and budgets tighten. “Increasingly, marketers are being asked to do more with less,” says Michael Service, SVP healthcare strategy at ChangeMakers Health. “That’s where agencies have to figure out how to be efficient and make every dollar work harder.”
Efficiency alone, though, can’t deliver impact. Autumn Gehring, ChangeMakers’ VP client partner and co-lead of the health marketing team, notes that the real pressure point lies deeper. “Our role is navigating healthcare complexities to deliver meaningful change, whether that’s helping physicians get faster access to information, improving workflows or making communication clearer for patients.” In other words, insight has to solve a real problem, not just shape a message.
That belief informs how ChangeMakers handles every challenge. Clients may come with tactics already in mind, but the agency scrutinizes whether those solutions match the underlying issue. The goal is to ground strategy in insights strong enough to justify the spend. That can mean layering traditional research with social listening, tapping into industry databases or leveraging AI. “Too often, budgets get spent on tactics that don’t get at the root of the challenge,” Service says. “By digging deeper, we uncover the real insight, and that’s what allows us to deliver work that actually shifts behaviour.”
Changemakers Health’s campaign for Invokana sparked record engagement across channels, boosting brand awareness and patient recall.
That discipline was tested in a direct-to-consumer campaign for Invokana, a type 2 diabetes treatment. On paper, the brief was to raise awareness in a crowded category. But the breakthrough insight came from research: people with diabetes resisted being defined by their condition. “It’s what they have, not who they are,” Service says. From that truth came the “I’m More Than My Condition” campaign: portraits of real-life patients framed by their passions and identities, with diabetes pushed into the background.
The centrepiece was an original anthem that crossed into mainstream radio, even drawing praise from DJs. “That kind of resonance, in a space as regulated as pharma, only happens when you anchor a campaign in an authentic human truth,” Service says. And the results were further proof: website traffic and organic search grew exponentially, and brand awareness lifted across the board.
But insight isn’t useful unless it can be validated. That’s why ChangeMakers created the Health Advisory Panel, a standing network of Canadian physicians, patients and caregivers built in partnership with global research firm Leger. The goal was to validate assumptions quickly and cost-effectively, turning instinct into evidence. “We wanted to take hunches off the table,” Gehring says.
That approach came to life in a recent project with a national medical association that wanted to clarify its identity. The advisory panel was proposed as a way for ChangeMakers to test how other healthcare providers viewed the specialty, providing valuable insight that could be turned into impactful action. “If we’re going to ask clients to invest, we need to know the problem we’re solving is real,” Gehring says. “The panel gives us that clarity, and that’s what makes impact possible.”
That same philosophy shapes how the agency approaches today’s thorniest issues. Take misinformation: ChangeMakers’ research shows Canadian physicians now spend nearly a full day each week correcting false health advice that patients find online or elsewhere. To close that gap, the agency validates messaging and develops campaigns that address the root of medical misunderstandings. In one case, research uncovered that many physicians were frustrated because existing treatments were only managing symptoms but not addressing the underlying cause. By clarifying the science in a way that physicians could easily convey, ChangeMakers was able to help patients better understand that more could be done.
For Invokana’s “More Than My Condition” campaign, ChangeMakers Health put the spotlight on people’s individuality rather than their diabetes, driving a massive spike in web traffic.
“Every day a patient follows false advice is a day they’re not getting the treatment they need,” Gehring says. “If brands don’t show up with credible, human messaging, the void gets filled by misinformation.”
And whether the challenge is misinformation, shrinking budgets or regulatory hurdles, the task is always the same: turn insight into action that makes a difference. For ChangeMakers, that means getting to the root problem, validating assumptions with real-world voices and accelerating research without sacrificing judgment.
In a sector where wasted time or misdirected spend can have real consequences for patients and providers, impact must be deliberate. As Service puts it: “Insight without impact is just research. Impact without insight is just luck.”
CONTACT:
Michael Service
SVP, healthcare strategy
michael.service@thechangemakers.com
