Patient: Every driver element within the campaign ended by letting people know that there is a diagnosis that their physician may not have been considered—one that might explain their battered bowels—before then driving them to the dedicated microsite, WhatAmIWrestlingWith.com.

Novartis disease awareness campaigns are heavily regulated, needing to satisfy numerous rounds of interdisciplinary review across medical, legal, and regulatory. The Wrestler had to successfully meet this boards stringent criteria.

All elements had to satisfy USA government regulations.

The TV component of the campaign was also subject to network clearance.

To grab people’s attention, and quickly and memorably represent what we learned was their most motivating symptoms—diarrhea, bloating, and GI pain—we created The Wrestler: a tiny professional wrestler with an over-the-top attitude and outsized ability to wreak havoc on stomachs.

The Wrestler lived across a carefully-designed ecosystem that included addressable national TV, endemic and programmatic display, social media, and a microsite.

We specifically chose targeted tools as these allowed us to direct our campaign to those matching our patient lookalike models in order to achieve the greatest likelihood of connecting with someone suffering from undiagnosed carcinoid syndrome.

Every driver element within the campaign ended by letting people know that there is a diagnosis that their physician may not have been considered—one that might explain their battered bowels—before then driving them to the dedicated microsite, WhatAmIWrestlingWith.com.

At WhatAmIWrestlingWith.com we introduced carcinoid syndrome along with critical information about it, provided an easy self-to-use self-diagnosis tool, and an action plan for following up with a specialist.

In just 8 months, The Wrestler delivered some high-flying results:

• Website visits exceeded internal targets by 200%

• Visits to GI specialist exceeded targets by 3.5x

• The number of carcinoid syndrome diagnoses increased by 8x compared to the same period the year prior

And most importantly of all, the number of people receiving treatment for carcinoid syndrome increased by 11x compared to the same period the previous year.

The Wrestler campaign was specifically designed to engage people living with unresolved GI issues with the specific end goal of having them follow up a healthcare clinician and raise carcinoid syndrome as a potential diagnosis and explanation.

To this end we created an omnichannel ecosystem consisting of addressable TV, endemic and programmatic display advertising, and Facebook advertising all of which drove to our dedicated microsite. The microsite hosted critical information, and easy self-assessment tool, and an action plan for following up with healthcare specialists.

Our core strategy was to identify a way to target this patients suffering from this rare condition, quickly build relevance, and inspire them to take action.

We consulted IBM Watson and similar data sources to retrospectively identify the “typical” path(s) to diagnosis, specifically looking for commonalities and patterns of misdiagnosis. From this we learned that diarrhea, stomach pain, and bloating were people’s most motivating and easily recognized symptom. This learning would form the basis of our approach to targeting and to signalling relevance.

We then also conducted primary research with people suffering from unresolved GI issues. We learned that people often received a misdiagnosis of IBS or IBD, leading them to believe that all other explanations had first been considered. This directly informed the call to action for all drivers within our tactical ecosystem—that there are other diagnoses that had not been considered and to learn more, visit WhatAmIWrestlingWith.com.