Gold
Horizon Therapeutics and Area 23
The Outside In Experiment
It’s rare that any marketing initiative can achieve success as both a knock-your-socks-off creative effort and an incredible bargain, but this campaign pulled it off.
For inspiration, the team went straight to the source, using social listening to explore the vivid ways those with uncontrolled gout describe their pain. The team fed words such as hornets, barbed wire and crushed glass into generative AI programs, along with medical descriptions of the anatomical implications of uncontrolled gout.
The AI-image generator helped visualize the painful menace of this dangerous buildup of uric acid crystals, causing excruciating pain in vital inner systems and organs.
To produce five films in six weeks, the team needed to create a new production workflow using an in-house team of prompt engineers, machine learning experts, creative technologists and mathematicians. It engineered dozens of prompts, generating 1,000 frames per film, each rendered as an individual image. Then it added fully immersive soundtracks.
The resulting films are as unsettling as the disease itself. They evoke empathy for the pain patients go through and speak directly to rheumatologists and nephrologists, highlighting systemic manifestations of gout that can cause much more harm than doctors may realize.
The campaign pushed the films via email and paid digital display, achieving a 16% email click-through rate.
The judges called this campaign “unique, awesome and impactful.” Best of all? It cost just $3,000.
Silver
Horizon Therapeutics and Area 23
The Systemic Booth
Uncontrolled gout is a low priority for nephrologists. So to break through at the 2023 National Kidney Foundation Conference, Horizon Therapeutics found a way to hijack attention, using a mobile AR experience triggered by floor decals. Animations depicted gout crystals invading vital organs. Participants who captured them all returned to the minimalist booth for a prize. The judges called the effort “ballsy and innovative.”
