As the saying goes, “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.” Biogen and ad agency 21Grams took that mantra to heart with their Gold Pharma Lions–winning social media campaign, “Friedreich’s Back,” for Friedreich’s ataxia (FA) treatment Skyclarys. At this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, they shared how they walked the fine line of humor in drug advertising.
“Friedreich’s Back” saw Nikolaus Friedreich, the German neurologist who discovered FA, rising from his grave only to discover, with horror, “they named a disease after me!” Still covered in dirt and dressed in Victorian-era attire, the actor who plays Friedreich is led to a Biogen internship on its Skyclarys team, where he teams up with Generation Z scientist Izzy Garcia to learn more about the treatment while humorously adjusting to the modern world he woke up in. Skyclarys is the only approved treatment for FA, as the ad emphasizes.
Biogen launched the nine-part series on its Skyclarys Instagram and TikTok pages, racking up more than 2 million views in the first three weeks and driving more than 5,000 users to the Skyclarys product website. By the time it was submitted to Cannes, the ad campaign had reached 9 million views, surpassing the entire FA patient population of roughly 15,000 by 600 times.
By all measures, the bold idea was a roaring success. After all, humor is “like brain fertilizer for memory,” executive creative director at ad agency 21Grams Christopher Charles explained in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing. “People remember you when you’re funny.”
Still, humor can be a touchy subject in healthcare, especially for the progressive neurodegenerative rare diseases Biogen works in. But research does show that laughter can lower stress, offering a “powerful tool” for humanizing even the “most challenging of topics,” Biogen’s vice president and head of marketing for rare diseases Sundip (Sunny) Ravel added in the group interview.
Even before the Pharma Lions winners were decided, Biogen and 21Grams already had their idea validated at the world’s most prestigious advertising showcase with a planned session at the Cannes festival. It’s a rare feat for a pharma company to grace the Cannes stage in its own session, but Biogen accomplished that with Thursday’s “Laughing at Doom: Using Humor to Talk about Illness/Hellscapes.”
Joining Biogen and 21Grams on stage was Fiona Cauley, a Nashville, Tennessee-based comedian who uses Skyclarys to treat her FA. Cauley and the voices of others in the FA community were key in making “Friedreich’s Back” possible. For Ravel, the “moment the penny dropped” and convinced the company to lean into humor is when Cauley said, “I laugh because I’ve cried enough.”
From those words, which to Ravel were “way too powerful to overlook,” the company dived into a concentrated effort to immerse itself with others in the community. With “deep insight work” and ethnographic research as well as work with advocacy organizations, Biogen “earned the right” to laugh with its patients, he added.
“You have to gut-check, you have to work with the community, you have to work with advocacy groups and stuff, and just get a really, really good understanding that you're being responsible with your comedy,” Charles noted.
Charles and his team found that with “really, really strong” insight from patients and proper time invested into understanding them enough to deliver messages in a respectful way with the right nuance, “oh my God, it works. It works 10-fold. It works 100-fold.”
The goal of the campaign was to raise awareness for FA, an ultrarare disease that can take years to diagnose due to its rarity. Based on the campaign’s millions of views and clicks to the Skyclarys website, it seems that mission may have been accomplished. Even more validating, Ravel said, was the response from patients and advocacy groups after seeing the series.
“Seeing their reception and the smiles on their face was the thing that did it for us.”
The nine-episode series was able to empower patients in a different way than the “low-hanging fruit” of disease education, which often features a patient telling their story in a straightforward manner, Charles noted. “Friedreich’s Back” manages to explain the disease and the treatment while being entertaining and not “talking at” the audience.
21Grams and Biogen took care to make sure that the dark comedy in the ad wasn’t offensive, choosing a long-dead researcher and turning him into a fictional, “goofy character,” Charles explained. Ravel pointed to Bill Nye, who made a career out of taking complicated scientific issues and “having fun with it.” Nye, an ataxia advocate who works with the U.S. National Ataxia Foundation, joined Ravel, Charles and Cauley on stage for the Cannes session.
The humor-ridden path “Friedreich’s Back” carved is one that Charles thinks others can follow in healthcare advertising. Along with the session, 21Grams dropped a report on the concept, using “Friedreich’s Back” as an example and highlighting how brands can quantify the impact of humor as a key performance indicator in itself.
“Humor forges connection, captures attention, and lowers defenses – making even difficult or complex messages more memorable, approachable, and actionable,” 21Grams explained. “And in a category where advertising contains vital information, humor could quite literally be the difference between life and death.”