Lighter Blue is for consumers who deal with or know someone dealing with multiple depression symptoms. The campaign educates our audience on symptoms they may not otherwise know about and provides them with helpful tips, news and a forum to share their stories and help support others.

In the U.S., even unbranded pharma advertising is heavily scrutinized by a pharmaceutical company’s legal, medical and regulatory departments. Using humor in our advertising was even more challenging; regulatory people typically don’t have a positive view of humor. Especially when the medical condition in question is depression.

The stigma surrounding depression hasn’t gone away yet. And that breeds a lack of understanding about the condition because sufferers are too afraid to reach out for help. If they were to reach out, they would find that sadness isn’t the only symptom of depression. There are others such as difficulty concentrating and tiredness, which can feel isolating. And depression as a category is…depressing. It mainly consists of dark images and somber messages that sufferers don’t actually relate to.

Enter: Lighter Blue, an unbranded Facebook campaign that tells the story of Blue—a little guy with a big blue head who, like our audience, feels isolated and struggles to function due to depression. Blue and his friends use honest humor as a way to express the somewhat uncomfortable truth about depression.

Lighter Blue launched in 2016 and has rolled out over 100 simply illustrated posts and videos that talk about the funny truths of having depression, along with health tips, motivational sayings, news, inspiration and more. We chose Facebook as the platform for our campaign due to the broad reach of both the condition and the platform.

The most we expected of sufferers with such a stigmatizing condition was to view our page. But, we were so wrong. Lighter Blue became so much more than just a Facebook campaign—it grew into a true community for depression sufferers. Blue seemed to evoke an uncharacteristically open response from members who shared stories and offered words of support to each other…even though they’re all strangers.

This year, social engagements reached over 10 million, exceeding our goal six fold! Far from simply lurking, people were reacting (>8M), sharing (>1.5M), and commenting (>300K). One post alone generated over a million likes. This avalanche of social engagement told us one thing: we had unlocked a pent-up demand for highly engaging, relatable content and fresh education about depression.

And while this wasn’t the goal, it is the icing on the cake: We’ve become the most successful unbranded pharmaceutical Facebook page of all time.

In this day and age, people are sharing their entire personal lives on social media. So, why shouldn’t depression be a part of the conversation? The objective was to educate sufferers about multiple depression symptoms, helping to start the conversation on social media. Here, they would be able to see that they’re not alone.

In our research, we found that people with depression often use self-deprecating humor as a way to deal with depression. Humor (a genre usually avoided like the plague in the depression space) was our way of telling the depression community that we hear them. Using emotions and situations that are familiar to them helped us to break through the stigma and got people talking.