ABOUT

Background
There are more than 3 million rare disease patients in Spain. Not that rare, right? Despite this increasing amount, this community is practically invisible for the broad population and even worse, when it comes to early diagnosis mechanisms or access to treatments: innovating or educating health professionals is too expensive for these unique diseases when compared to more common and largely studied ones.
But we don’t know what we can’t see. So, for the fourth year in a row, Alexion – AstraZeneca’s rare disease division – wanted to capitalise on the peak of visibility during Rare Disease Day by using its power of influence to expose the unmet needs of RD patients, reclaim solutions to policymakers and raise awareness among people around these patients’ right to have a meaningful life, like the rest of us.

INSIGHT
43% of RD patients report to have suffered discrimination. In the origin of this exclusion is the lack of knowledge and a paternalizing attitude toward illness: we just label these patients as ‘ill’, letting this label define them.
IDEA
Honoring the fact that these patients undergo an ongoing journey of doctor visits until they have a diagnosis, we created a social experiment where we invited several RD patients to ‘participate in a study’.
Real doctors would ask them the regular medical questions and surprise them with more personal ones: what their dreams were, the things that made them smile, the people they love.
At the end, the doctor would hand them a very special diagnosis: The Identity Diagnosis, a poem written in the spot by Noah Higón, RD patient and poet, featuring the first diagnosis that reveal who they truly are as a person, not the disease they face.

Strategy

#MyIdentityIsNotRare. Our strategy’s aim was to unlock the power of empathy by giving RD patients the space to define themselves beyond their disease, on one hand, and by making people reflect about the things that make themselves unique, on the other.
We created a hero video that showed our social experiment and the emotive and hopeful reactions of RD patients when being recognized for whom they really are as a person.
And, to give people the opportunity of obtaining their own Identity Diagnosis, we programmed a poet AI where anyone could answer a few questions and receive a personalized poem summarizing their unique approach to life.
We wanted our message all over the place, so this formula where people could share their own Identity Diagnosis would guarantee an organic amplification of the initiative making RD disease patients’ voice be heard.

Execution
Our hero film was the centrepiece of our website, 3millonesyanoesraro and showed patients reading their identity diagnoses while viewing important moments in their lives.

The website also hosted our AI poet bot, and allowed users to easily share their Identity Diagnosis poems on their social networks.

Seven content creators, from popular Spanish journalists and family and lifestyle influencers, expanded the message to different types of audiences, encouraging them to join the initiative #MyIdentityIsNotRare.

We collaborated with two nationally broadcast podcasts, discussing personal stories about who these patients are beyond their illnesses.

Then, we launched a branded content campaign in large general media outlets including Mediaset, The New Barcelona Post, and El Mundo. This extended to audiences in the health sector such as iSanidad. Additionally, several health-focused media platforms such as IM Médico Hospitalario, Infosalus, Redografia Medico, and general media such as Pronto, La Razón, and ABC also discussed the initiative.

Results

• Influencer Campaign:
o 380,659 impressions
o 17,191 engagements
o 1,943 clicks
• Video Hero:
o 167,400 views
• Podcast:
o 547,544 video views
o 8,410 engagements
• Social Media Campaign:
o 5,368,971 impressions
o 1,849,238 video views (3.27% CTR)
• Google Ads:
o 342,731 impressions
o 162,088 video views
o 925 URL clicks (.27% CTR)
• Branded Content:
o 3,857,137 impressions
o 5,270 article readings
• Interviews:
o 6,223,935 audience
• Press Release:
o 2,687,248 audience