Depression Management campaign [Wyeth]

Wyeth: BluePrint for Hope

Harnessing the Power of Social Media to Educate Women About Depression Management

 

Challenge

Depression is treatable, but many patients don’t get the care they need.  Stigma and adherence are two major barriers.  Wyeth set out to address this by educating consumers about depression and the value of adherence (sticking with a treatment plan, including medication as prescribed by a doctor) and ongoing support in successfully managing their condition.

Intelligence

Research demonstrated a lack of consumer understanding of the benefits of a “therapeutic alliance” — a strong relationship between patient and physician — in depression management and that Online and home decorating/home improvement were some of the most popular hobbies of the target.

Insights

As a result of our extensive research we came up with the following insights about the target audience: 

§ She needs resources and increasingly searches online for information

§ She wants to continue playing a key role in treatment decisions and relies on peers and community for information

Approach

Our program goal was to create an unbranded, sustainable, patient-centric campaign that underscores the value of adherence to treatment and ongoing support and leverages traditional and new channels to engage the target.  We created “Blueprint For Hope” which leveraged the target’s interest in home improvement by enlisting Paige Hemmis of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition who suffers with depression but hadn’t publicly spoken about it. We then partnered with The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance as well as a psychiatrist with interest in adherence.

The campaign included national media activities, SMT/RMT, outreach to bloggers, our online depression resource, BlueprintforHope.com and a six-city patient and event media tour.

 
Success

Blueprint for Hope effectively underscored the value of adherence to treatment and ongoing support as evidenced by the effectiveness of message delivery — 100 percent of the coverage, which generated more than 316 million media impressions, included at least two campaign messages.  Coverage highlights included:

§ Seven national placements, including Fox News; ABC News Now; People; SELF

§ 29 SMT/RMT interviews

§ Online placements, including features on Health.com and PsychCentral.com blogs

§ Saturated local markets

§ Matte release (650,000 reached to date)

The campaign also inspired people to take action, attend local events and see their doctors.  Nearly 60 percent of local event attendees completed a survey.  Of those, more than 90 percent indicated they found the information presented at the event “useful” or “very useful,” and nearly 70 percent of respondents indicated their intent to take action by sharing the event information with their doctor.

 BlueprintforHope.com has attracted 8,800 visits, with spikes in traffic following campaign activity.  The People article resulted in an eight-fold increase in Web traffic.  Paid search/SEO campaigns have successfully augmented Web traffic (e.g., one sixth of visits from May through October were driven by the paid search campaign).