It’s been years since the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity awarded its top prize to a traditional pharmaceutical company, and even longer since a campaign for a simple pill made the top of the ranks. This year, Viatris broke the mold by going back to the basics with a creative workaround to promote its “little blue pill” in countries that frown on direct-to-consumer advertising.
That’s not to say the Cannes Pharma Lions Grand Prix-winning Viatris campaign, “Make Love Last,” was a basic, run-of-the-mill pharma ad. It was anything but. Spearheaded by the ad agency Ogilvy Health’s Shanghai team, the project took a “delicate and indirect approach” to highlight intimacy with the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra while adhering to China’s pharmaceutical advertising regulations and acknowledging that sex “remains a sensitive topic” in the country, according to Oglivy.
Like many countries, China strictly regulates its drug ads and prohibits DTC advertising. To work around this, Viatris and Oglivy went with an unbranded ad that references Viagra only as a blue diamond shape that appears near the end of the advertisement.
Renowned artist Lavender Cheng used time-lapse photography to capture intimate scenes of real couples while avoiding nudity that could be subject to censorship. The campaign won the Grand Prix for its “Make Love Last – Bedroom” piece, but the larger project launched on Valentine’s Day as an art and photography initiative that fostered an “open conversation” about intimacy online and garnered 350 million total impressions, according to Ogilvy.
It was Oglivy and Viatris’ ability to use drug ad regulations as a “creative brief” that made a splash in the Pharma Lions jury room, Pharma Jury President Franklin Williams said in the jury debrief. He highlighted how the piece used metaphor, sound and storytelling to communicate its message “with impact while carefully navigating legal constraints.”
Williams is the executive director of experience design at AREA 23, an IPG health company that won the Cannes Lions Healthcare Agency of the Year award.
“This was craft as a loophole,” Williams said. "It showed how you can play within the rules and still create something emotionally resonant and culturally sharp."
As the head of the prestigious Pharma Lions jury, Williams guided this year’s deliberations by encouraging his peers to identify work that was “not just technically sound but truly purposeful,” IPG Health reported from the jury debrief panel.
"The work must tell a story that motivates action," Williams said. "It must elevate the industry, not damage it."
That goes to his philosophy of “brilliant basics,” or campaigns that may seem simple but require excellent “craft, clarity and courage.”
Others that fit in that category were campaigns from Biogen and Sanofi, which won Gold and Bronze awards, respectively. Biogen and ad agency 21Grams’ “Friedreich’s Back” social media series for Friedreich’s ataxia treatment Skyclarys took on a unique comedic approach that managed to boost awareness without “trivializing” the topic at hand, one juror noted.
Sanofi and Havas Lynx won a Bronze for their “Scratched Out” prurigo nodularis (PN) campaign, which used a “subtle” visual craft to stimulate the feeling of itching by scratching each frame in the video by hand. William called the effort “incredible,” but the ad sparked jury debate over how clear that cleverness may have been to the audience.
Pharma winners break years-long tech trend
Either way, the jury’s decisions this year brought standard pharma companies back into the mix after years of Grand Prixs awarded to digital and medtech companies. Before Viatris and “Make Love Last,” the last pharma company to take home the top prize was GSK in 2019, which won for its work in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease awareness and the underdiagnosis of the disease in China. Still, even that campaign was for an app called Breath of Life, not a drug.
GSK’s win broke a three-year-long drought where no Grand Prixs were given out at all in the Pharma Lions category. In 2018, that was attributed to “no single piece of outstanding work” that lived up to the concept of “life-changing creativity,” according to that year’s jury president.
After GSK’s 2019 Grand Prix and the canceled awards in 2020 due to COVID-19, the pharma jury consistently recognized projects from the tech world. Woojer and its cystic fibrosis treatment vest won the top award in 2021, while Dell, Intel and Rolls-Royce took the prize in 2022 for a “voice bank” that creates digital copies of the voices of patients with motor neurone disease. In 2023, Eurofarma’s Parkinson’s disease app continued the trend, taking home the Pharma Grand Prix.
Last year, Siemens Healthineers received the Grand Prix for its “Magnetic Stories” audiobooks initiative, which transforms the often-frightening sounds of MRI machines into perfectly synced, whimsical audio stories, helping to ease children's fears during the exam. The “personalization at the lived experience level” that hallmarks the project is one that remained a “key theme” this year, Williams noted in a pre-Cannes op-ed. The head juror emphasized his desire to reward creativity that extends beyond the standard tropes that have previously defined pharma advertising and is “bold enough to reinvent what we do and say.”
“Health is no longer a niche conversation, it’s at the center of how we live, work and connect, everywhere,” Williams wrote. It’s the conversation on everyone’s lips regardless of the industry, and the work we champion this year will reflect that.”
“These are no longer just disease stories; these are life stories told through the lens of health.”