For the third year in a row, Cleveland Diagnostics is commemorating September’s Prostate Cancer Awareness Month with its “A PSA on PSA” campaign, which serves as a public service announcement about prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing.
While the first two iterations of the campaign were aimed at raising awareness of the importance of prostate cancer screening, this year’s version is “more action-oriented,” Bob Rochelle, ClevelandDx’s chief commercial officer, told Fierce Pharma Marketing in an interview.
“Often, the hardest part of this journey is just starting the conversation, and that’s where the ‘PSA on PSA’ program comes in,” he said. “In the previous years, it was all about awareness, fact sheets and donations. This year, we’re asking men, their families and other loved ones to take a simple pledge and actively talk about prostate cancer, actively talk about prostate cancer screening among themselves and just get that dialogue going.”
Located on the campaign’s website, the pledge comprises three simple bullet points: promises to talk to a doctor about prostate health, to encourage someone the signer cares about to do the same and to help spread awareness.
Signing the pledge requires only a first and last name. As Rochelle explained, “It is very, very simple. We didn’t want to take email addresses and phone numbers and bug people—we truly wanted to make it very simple. Take the pledge, talk to your loved ones about being screened, visit PSAonPSA.com, log in your name. That’s all you need to do.”
Each signature will trigger a donation by ClevelandDx to the advocacy organization Zero Prostate Cancer; Zero has pledged to match all donations throughout September, and the exec noted that the partners are “looking for other matches as well.”
Both approaches to the campaign—awareness and action—are crucial, Rochelle said, especially as prostate cancer remains the second-most common cancer and the second-leading cause of cancer death among men in the U.S. but is very treatable if caught early.
“You need awareness of the disease, you need awareness of the screening options and awareness of the treatment options, but you also need people to engage, you need people to act on that awareness,” he said. “Knowledge is only good if it’s effective, and it’s only good if it’s effecting change.”
As for why ClevelandDx has chosen to re-up the “PSA on PSA” campaign for three years running rather than launching an entirely new initiative every Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, Rochelle cited both the importance of “consistency of message” and the success of the campaign’s previous runs.
“You’re not going to have the effectiveness, from a marketing standpoint, if you just put out one advertisement. But if you put the same messaging or similar messaging out year after year, it tends to build on itself,” he said. “The second thing is, you do market analytics, and you look at different campaigns … you look at what works, and the ‘PSA on PSA’ campaign, from our awareness objectives in the previous couple of years, has met or exceeded those initial objectives. So, we wanted to stick with the same brand, but tweak it a little bit to drive more men to have those conversations and move from awareness to action.”
In that push toward action, this year’s version of the campaign will reach potential pledge signers through “a number of different media campaigns,” he said, including on social media and in journals and other media outlets, as well as via Zero and Quest Diagnostics, ClevelandDx’s lab partner.
Though the campaign is unbranded, its website does include a blurb at the bottom about ClevelandDx’s own IsoPSA test, and Rochelle listed steering more men toward IsoPSA among the initiative’s three primary goals—which also include getting more men screened for prostate cancer in general and, if needed, directing the right men toward subsequent testing.
Current guidelines recommend that men of average risk begin prostate cancer screening at age 50, repeating every two years unless a high PSA level is detected, which should trigger follow-up testing.
IsoPSA is meant to follow up a standard PSA test showing elevated levels of the antigen, to help clarify whether more costly follow-ups like MRIs and biopsies are actually necessary, since PSA tests have high sensitivity but low specificity, leading to high rates of false positives.
ClevelandDx’s flagship test, meanwhile, is designed to determine whether those heightened PSA levels originated in cancer cells or are due to some other benign factor, and a recently published study showed that the test “can be effective in predicting cancer risk over multiple years,” per Rochelle.
By potentially driving more patients toward a company’s own product, awareness campaigns may ultimately benefit the bottom line, but Rochelle noted that “A PSA on PSA" is doing so by “doing well by the patient, the caregiver and the payer, by providing more effective testing.”
“It serves both purposes,” he said. “We’ll be very successful as a company and as a business if we do well by the customer. And I love doing well by doing good.”