There are many differences between life science and medical marketing compared to the rest of the advertising world.
These differences extend far beyond the legal and regulatory limits and instead, centre around the shape and look of success and the unique nature of calls to action in this space.
There are many examples of campaigns that are popular but fail to lead to tangible success, raising awareness but not leading to a greater takeup of healthier habits, screenings or healthcare that may be needed.
A great example of this is found with the character Nick O’Teen, a collaboration between London’s Health Education Council, the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and DC Comics, the creators of the comic superhero Superman.
Consisting of a mix of print and television advertising, the Nick O’Teen campaign used the rather familiar anti-smoking and anti-drug advertising convention of the malevolent stalking pusher who tries to tempt children to try cigarettes to get them addicted and shorten their lives.
It started with a poster featuring Superman, licensed at presumably considerable expense, talking about the dangers of cigarettes, and the popularity of the poster campaign led to a wider narrative and an engaging cross-media campaign.
The central focus was that children were invited to sign a pledge to fight this smoking supervillain by not taking up smoking, and they would get a goody bag featuring pin badges and posters featuring Superman if they did.
Purely going by awareness and engagement metrics, the campaign was a huge success, with 800,000 requests for posters from an audience of children that had typically been seen as reluctant to overly heavy-handed public health messaging.
However, it was strongly criticised in some circles and seen as a sign of an overall decline in children’s media, resembling the rather blunt marketing characteristic of the DARE campaign in the 1980s.
As well as this, the popularity of the campaign did not seem to lead to a measurable drop in childhood smoking rates in the United Kingdom during that time, suggesting that the audience it captured was unlikely to smoke anyway.
This highlights the importance of defining success in a marketing campaign beyond raising awareness.
