Dive Brief:
- An advertisement for a respiratory device from Philips won top honors at the Cannes Lions Health festival last weekend, while several big pharmaceutical companies also received awards for their marketing campaigns.
- Created by Ogilvy & Mather, the "Breathless Choir" ad showed people with respiratory diseases such as chronic pulmonary obstruction disease (COPD) learning to sing with their condition while using a Philips oxygen concentrator device.
- The Cannes Lions festival has held the Lions Health competition, a special healthcare segment of the broader event, for only the past three years. An unbranded campaign from AstraZeneca won the top Grand Prix award last year.
Dive Insight:
Philips campaign is aimed at raising awareness of respiratory conditions like COPD, cystic fibrosis, and asthma. Launched last November, the Ogilvy ad helped boost sales of the SimplyGo Mini oxygen concentrator by 14% in the fourth quarter, reports Medical Marketing and Media.
The two-minute ad used a story-telling element to highlight the reality of living with a disease which obstructs normal breathing and lung function. Rather than following the standard healthcare advertising approach of focusing on a product's technical capabilities, the ad only shows the product several times.
Pfizer won gold with a print ad made by McCann Health for Xalatan eye drops. Another gold prize went to Teva for its "Parkinsounds" campaign for Parkinson's disease, designed by Havas Life.