Lilly's winning tagline, "we take diabetes personally"

Was nice to catch some glimpses in Amsterdam of some new ads companies have - though the real ads I'm hoping to see this week are the Byetta direct-to-consumer ads I heard about Monday but have yet to see. There are 60-second ads to be played on shows like Sixty Minutes and ads in places like Time Magazine and the Economist (Johnny reads this cover to cover every week but I rarely get past Asia, unfortunately, except when they are writing about healthcare or art, both of which they should do more of...) Anyway! I like these little "We take diabetes ... personally" spots. I find them warming and loved that they were all over Amsterdam - not just in the exhibition halls but right out there in real life. Right where diabetes should be ... and, increasingly, is. Last night at Kinko's, the man looking up our account number said, when he found it, "Close Concerns, what is Close Concerns!" I told him we we a little company that focused on the business of diabetes, and before I could say anything else he said in a resigned way "Right, I have that." "You too?" I said. Surprised, but not really. I asked him when he was diagnosed (everyone has that moment etched on their brain, don't they, whether we like it or not) and he said recently, and after we talked about that for awhile, suddenly members of the same club, he said he was taking metformin, which he didn't like, due to his upset stomach. I was sad to find out he not only didn't have a diabetes educator, but he didn't even know what one was ("what is that?"), and he also didn't know what A1c meant. I played the hip "Faces" Ad Council piece for him on youtube (www.midiabetesa1c) and that was great - he wrote down the website with zero prompting and said he was going to tell his doctor about the test. Yes, some days it seems like we've come a far way, other days less far. Anyway, it's not hard to figure out why I like that tagline, 'we take diabetes personally' ... as long as I'm thinking about it pretty much 24/7, it's nice to think others are too who are helping take care of us. I'm a marketer's dream, I know ... so of course we'll watch this campaign and let actions speak louder than words! In the meantime, I do like those images... and Eli Lilly had perhaps the best news of any company at the EASD this year when it said a couple of days ago that Dr. Robert Heine had joined the company. Dr. Heine has been involved in impressive research trial after impressive research trial over the years and it says a lot for Lilly that this luminary would join them starting next month in Indianapolis, Lilly's headquarters. Excellent win - when it's all said and done, I may or may not be drawn to an ad campaign, but it starts and ends with the science so bully for Lilly that it has drawn such an exceptional researcher to its folds. Presumably Dr. Heine feels he can make a bigger difference for patients in helping develop new medicines - we certainly hope so!

Comments

[Frank Varon DDS]

I am glad Lilly is doing its part in diabetes care through it's ad promotion campaign. They had been a bit absent lately.

KELLY!
anything on the EASD/ADA/IFCC consensus on the A1c? I have yet to see any press release on the CGM versus average glucose study that was supposed to be released this month.

Frank

[kelly]

hey there i one hundred percent agree - great news. Last year they said they were working to turn around their insulin franchise and i remember writing at the time that i wasn't sure how they would do that - the absence of a long acting analog is a difficult problem to solve, for sure. Then again, I thought sure that Dr. Heine could probably join whatever company he liked and clearly he had some reason for this! I think he will bring lots of intelligence to the company and the faster one company innovates, seemingly the faster everyone innovates, so that is great news for patients. They share profits on Byetta only in the US I believe - I think outside the US, at least for a few years, the way the deal is structured, at least up until some milestone, all the profits go to them. Both Merck and Novartis will be selling Januvia and Galvus (actually, a Galvus/Metformin combo called Eucreas - good name!) in the EU, so it will be interesting to see how that goes. It'll also be interesting to see if FDA was right or if FDA was too cautious with holding back Galvus.

[Scott]

I think Lilly badly needs the addition of Robert Heine if they hope to remain a viable player in this market. They have sqaundered a near-monopoly (some 85% of the insulin market) over the last decade and the company is continuing to loose ground to Novo and Sanofi in part, because they do not have a long-acting analog to sell, and PBMs have instead made Novo and Sanofi's complete product lines their "preferred" brands. Their entire current market strategy relies mainly on their partnership with Amylin, but they also share the profits for those product. A few snazzy insulin pens will not turn that around, they need a strategy man running the show, so this is indeed good news for Lilly. Maybe now we can start to believe Sidney Taurel's promises!