Boehringer Ingelheim’s Not Just One Disease blog at ASCO picked up one of two digital prizes at the 2015 Communiqué Awards last week.
The work by Ogilvy HealthPR took home the Porter Novelli Award for Excellence in Digital Communications – Prescription Products/Patient Health at the ceremony in London.
The online, multi-channel approach aimed to drive a dialogue around the most important issues related to the disease at the largest global cancer medical congress ASCO in 2014.
It saw a group of lung cancer specialists, patients and scientists share their lung cancer journeys with an audience of thousands on Boehringer blog, challenging misconceptions and bringing to life the message that lung cancer is ‘Not Just One Disease’.
The disease-focused blog was the first of its kind in pharma and open for comments – an unusual move for the, often conservative, industry.
The campaign surpassed all of Boehringer’s expectations, generating over 50,000 tweets and 200 million impressions during the five-day congress.
It also received 14,855 page views and 3,693 unique visitors and, using #ASCO14, there were 6.2 million impressions of @Boehringer on Twitter, a 350% increase from 2013.
The Communiqué judges said: “If you look at Boehringer Ingelheim’s consistency in social media they are one of the few pharma organisations pushing ahead in this space.
“They established a clear strategy for evaluating risks and benefits, added in non-pharma social media community management and applied it within the industry. This was a really well executed campaign and a clear winner.
“Outside of pharma companies, anyone would have been proud of this campaign, which showed that a pharmaceutical company can be a trusted partner in oncology.”
Digital consumer health excellence
Meanwhile, the Awards’ second digital category saw success for SymTrac – the first NHS-approved MS mobile app by Aurora for Novartis, which was highly commended.
But winning the Porter Novelli Award for Excellence in Digital Communications – Consumer Health category was Ketchum’s #thinkhepatitis for the World Hepatitis Alliance.
The campaign aimed to educate people with lifesaving information about viral hepatitis and drive the initiation of national hepatitis strategies.
Launched at the 53-nation Commonwealth Games with the world’s largest Tweet Wall, a Thunderclap campaign reached 14.5 million people through digital influencers such as the WHO, UNICEF and Stephen Fry. The work also saw
6.5 million SMS text messages across Sub Saharan Africa to educate hard-to-reach audiences.
In total, 157 countries and 87 governments joined the campaign, which proved to be the most engaged World Hepatitis Day to date, reaching 148 million people via Twitter using the hashtag #thinkhepatitis.
The Communiqué judges said: “Amazing results with a limited budget, this looks great and clearly resonates with its stakeholders. It has had some great results and got really heavy hitters behind it. The work created a publicity storm around this issue by creating a lot of noise and engagement in a very cost-effective way.”
Run by PMLiVE publisher the PMGroup, the Communiqué programme is specifically designed to recognise and commend excellence and best practice in local, European and international healthcare communications.
