2014 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Dermatologists don’t prescribe Humira, because they mainly treat physical symptoms and often don’t realise the depth of the psychological trauma their patients are suffering from. Pharmaceutical advertising restrictions meant we couldn’t openly advertise Humira so we needed to find an innovative way to speak directly to these dermatologists and get them to understand that the power to change, and very often save, their patient’s lives was truly in their hands.

The Brief

Psoriasis is a disease that makes your immune system attack your body. More than a million sufferers have it covering over 75% of their body. Over 60% of these sufferers also live with serious depression and think seriously about killing themselves. Humira is a drug that can dramatically reduce the symptoms and help people live normal lives again, but dermatologists don’t prescribe it, because they often don’t realise the depth of the psychological trauma caused by Psoriasis. We needed to find a way to speak directly to these dermatologists.

How the final design was conceived

We created our own direct mailer to target dermatologists in their own offices. We went out and personally interviewed Psoriasis sufferers then hand wrote over 400 letters based on their true stories, and sent them to dermatologists across the region so they could hear the stories of suffering straight from the patients themselves. We researched famous suicide letters, then designed and hand-crafted every aspect of the anguished handwritten copy, to make it look and feel authentic enough to catch the dermatologists off-guard and drive our message home.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

Even though this hard-hitting personal campaign has just launched it’s had a big impact. We have seen a 75% response rate so far and dermatologist’s attitudes around the region are starting to change.