For the 2.3M people suffering from MS, visiting their specialist only happens twice a year. What they recall during visits doesn’t represent the reality they face. There’s no universal accessible tool that captures invisible progression over time that patients can use to share their journey with their doctors.

Floodlight Open is a transformational, free program with an app that tracks data from active tests and passive monitoring over time. Floodlight’s mission is to understand progression and ultimately improve the lives of people with MS. But in order for it to work, scientists need to adopt it in their research, physicians need to reference data in their practice, and patients need to use it.

Nothing like this had been done before. The approach was completely new and needed a name, a brand identity, and a campaign. We needed a message that could breakthrough skepticism, create understanding, and drive adoption.

See Beyond the Surface is about understanding MS progression together - communicating that the power to make invisible visible is in your hands with Floodlight. When you join Floodlight, as a scientist, researcher, or physician you become a part of something bigger - a group of people moving research forward and developing a clearer, more continuous picture of MS.

The same way Floodlight uncovers what lies beneath the surface, the creative idea focuses on the moment the picture is illuminated for each person individually and for the MS community as a whole. We created a visual design language using dots to represent time. Every execution layers collective data over humanity to demonstrate its transformative power. With Floodlight’s biomarker and sensor data, we can reveal a more complete picture of MS. One person. One data point. One discovery at a time.

Each data point from each patient contributes to a unique and open dataset designed to help move MS research forward. Therefore, data drove every aspect of our efforts – from the creative premise to patient-focused communications. Our strategy was simple: “Illuminate the dots. Complete the MS picture.” For our campaign, See Beyond the Surface, we translated each day of a patient’s life into a single dot, representing the data collected from that day. Seeing only 2 data points out of 365 days made it clear that most of the MS journey is in the dark. But with Floodlight, we can reveal hidden progression to complete the MS picture.

Progression can be a scary reality to confront, so all of our content needed to explain how data was collected and why you should participate with empathy and inspiration. We also needed to provide people with real time feedback to encourage continued adherence, but we need to be transparent that this is not a diagnostic tool. So all data was presented as a story about insight into your condition that can help you today, with a larger long term goal of improving the lives of people with MS.

Before Floodlight was Floodlight, it was a passion project with a big mission and no identity. It was hard to explain and faced headwinds of skepticism. The industry wasn’t prepared for something so visionary and so free. We cracked the code on defining the brand and building cohesive messaging across internal and external touchpoints.

We promoted Floodlight at the largest neuroscience congresses around the world. Our booth design was unlike any other. Creative illustrated the idea behind Floodlight and demonstrated how everyone’s participation is necessary. Interactive videos explain how tests work from their patient’s perspective and how the data leads to insights for researchers. The website explains why and how their patients can join the access study on smartphones. The Floodlight Open study is currently live in the US and Canada and will open to other countries around the world in late 2019.

The congress experience successfully drove awareness, with key opinion leaders, medical journals, universities, and even mainstream press picking up the story (Bloomberg, CNET, Medium, Business Wire, amongst others).

The Floodlight presence at ECTRIMS 2018 attracted 7,218 unique visitors out of the 10,000 attendees (a huge 70%+ of total delegates). People spent an average 6 minutes engaging with our content and 24% returned to the booth to re-engage.

Floodlight Open is recruiting participants twice as fast as a traditional trials and is tracking to accelerate over time.

Floodlight is now one of the world’s leading MS research tools. Scientists, academics, and hospitals across 3 continents are using Floodlight in research and clinical practice, drawing on the combined power of Floodlight and traditional sources in the quest for new understanding and outcomes.

Floodlight is ushering in a new era of MS understanding. One person. One data point. One discovery at a time.