With Viatris taking home the biggest prize at this year’s Cannes Pharma Lions award and Biogen winning Gold, pharma is making a comeback.
After a lackluster showing in 2024 extended a yearslong trend of similar outcomes, biopharmas may have had a chip on their shoulder coming into this year’s 72nd iteration of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Held in the south of France after the film festival, the advertising awards festival kicked off Monday with the Pharma Lions awards, which saw pharmas return to the limelight with three of them boasting winning campaigns. For the past few years, digital and tech companies have outnumbered drugmakers on the winning podium.
Viatris was the night’s big winner this time, taking home the Grand Prix award for its “Make Love Last - Bedroom” ad for erectile dysfunction med Viagra.
Over the soft piano-driven balled “Go Solo” by Tom Rosenthal, a couple intertwined in lovemaking is visible only in time-lapsed blurs. The two move across the bed in several different positions as the camera creeps closer before a white screen that reads “Make Love Last” takes over the screen, complete with a blue diamond representing the patented “little blue pill.”
Viatris, which markets branded Viagra after forming from a Pfizer subsidiary merger in 2020, teamed up with the Shanghai branch of ad agency Ogilvy on the project. Because DTC pharma ads aren’t allowed in China and sex “remains a sensitive topic,” Oglivy Shanghai took a “delicate and sensitive approach” on the campaign to foster an “open conversation about intimacy” while cooperating with Chinese drug ad regulations, the ad team said of the project. The “Bedroom” version is part of a larger “Make Love Last” series.
“This piece stood out by saying everything without needing to say a word,” Pharma Lions jury president Franklin Williams, who serves as executive experience director at AREA 23 (an IPG Health company), said in a Cannes release.
“Its long-exposure technique delivered intimacy and product benefit with breathtaking subtlety, turning regulation into creative opportunity. Beautifully crafted and emotionally resonant, it made a pharmaceutical brand feel deeply human.”
For Williams, the piece was a “bold yet quiet masterclass in storytelling and an unforgettable example of how craft can carry meaning,” he added.
If Viatris’ entry stood out for its creative cinematography and quiet beauty, Biogen took the opposite path to its win. The Boston-based biotech earned the category’s only Gold award for its “Friedreich’s Back,” a nine-part series that launched on social media to promote Skyclarys, the only FDA-approved treatment for inherited rare disease Friedreich’s ataxia.
Partnering with ad agency 21Grams, Biogen’s “Friedreich’s Back” accomplished the tricky task of infusing dark comedy into education about a devastating disease and its treatment. The series sees an actor playing German neurologist Nikolaus Friedreich, who discovered Friedreich’s ataxia in the 1800s, rising from his grave. Stunned by the modern world and the revelation that “they named a disease after me,” Friedreich quickly finds himself as an intern working on Skyclarys alongside a snarky Generation Z counterpart in a storyline scored with a “Friedreich’s Back” theme song.
Biogen was nominated for four awards at this year’s Cannes, all for ads that centered on Friedreich’s ataxia. Last year, the company was one of two pharmas that took home a medal at the Pharma Lions, albeit a Bronze one.
This year, Sanofi and Regeneron snagged a Bronze of its own with “Scratched Out,” a patient engagement campaign for prurigo nodularis (PN) that the company made alongside Havas Lynx. “Scratched Out,” filmed in the style of home videos, features an actress playing a PN patient until the burden of her disease manifests in a scratched-out overlay covering her in the videos. Eventually, the scratches become smaller and the actress more visible until text on the screen alerts patients that “if you’re losing yourself to prurigo nodularis, there might be a way back.” Sanofi’s Regeneron-partnered immunology blockbuster Dupixent is the only targeted PN medicine available in the U.S.
While the three winning pharma campaigns edged their way into an awards list otherwise dominated by medtech and healthcare ads, other short-listed contenders from the likes of AstraZeneca, Merck, Novo Nordisk and more didn’t make the cut for the nine awards given out.
Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis and Sanofi’s consumer health spinout Opella appeared on the short list in the Health & Wellness category, but, out of those 33 winners announced Monday, none were a biopharma. On that side, Unilever’s “Vaseline Verified” campaign won the Grand Prix, highlighting the importance of debunking or confirming viral hacks in an ad featuring Vaseline scientists doing just that.
“This work proves how creativity, joy, science, and influencer culture can powerfully unite to fight false narratives, educate, and transform lives,” Health & Wellness jury president Eric Weisberg, global chief creative officer at Havas Health Network, commented.