Keep It Pumping
Global DTC & HCP Prelaunch for ENTRESTO (sacubitril/valsartan) at Novartis
Heart failure is the biggest epidemic the world had never heard of. More than 26 million people around the world live with heart failure, yet most people don’t know what it is, the symptoms it causes, or who is at risk. Many think it’s just a normal part of getting older.
Such low global awareness of this serious disease was not good news ahead of the launch of ENTRESTO, the first breakthrough drug in cardiology in many years. So instead of the usual patient and HCP education campaigns, Novartis asked for something much bigger: the most innovative global public awareness and social media program ever executed in pharma.
We met the challenge with Keep It Pumping. In phase 1, our target audience was no less than everyone in the world. Our client wanted to achieve 75MM exposures in the first 3 months. Keep It Pumping blew past that benchmark by a factor of 4. And at 6 months, it hit 670MM exposures and 6MM social actions.
The engine of success for Keep It Pumping was its powerful multichannel ecosystem of interdependent tactics. We integrated real-world activities such as celebrity events, Lego heart-sculpture build-a-thons, and an iPhone app for users to record, combine, and share their heartbeats. An online publishing partnership with Buzzfeed was unique in pharma and delivered extraordinary results.
The Keep It Pumping website itself was created in 5 languages and featured an interactive awareness map that visualized in real time the growing reach and impact of the campaign around the world. It remains active today at https://www.keepitpumping.com