Taking the drama out of routine testing
for The Canadian Aids Treatment Information Exchange
Bad soap opera, good outcome
How to get the word out on a complicated and potentially overwhelming medical issue? With a little humour.
We created our own soap opera to raise awareness about hepatitis C. In a nod to the ridiculousness of medical soap operas like General Hospital, we showed that testing newcomer and immigrant communities for hep C prevents unnecessary “drama.”
Services
Strategy
Campaign identity
Creative testing
Video
Website
Static ads
Media buying
Bilingual
A problem that’s anything but cliché
Even by medical professionals, hepatitis C often gets brushed aside when it comes to newcomer and immigrant communities. Hepatitis C especially gets pinned with the stereotype that it’s only an issue for people who use drugs—despite high infection rates among newcomers from high-prevalence countries.
Those assumptions mean a lot of people slip through routine health assessments without ever being screened. And because early hepatitis B and C infections have zero symptoms, most people feel fine and don’t get tested. What’s more, many healthcare providers still don’t realize hepatitis C is now curable with a simple 8–12-week treatment.
Injecting Drama Into the Facts
We started with building a tested message foundation. We tested 4 approaches: a personal story, a focus on impact on patients, a focus on impact on healthcare workers, and a “just the facts” approach. These messages were tested with 1,400 healthcare professionals across Canada, with a special focus on people who work with immigrant and newcomer patients. Through this testing, healthcare workers overwhelmingly told us they responded well to a “just the facts” approach.
But anyone who has been to a doctor’s office knows: Healthcare providers get a lot of “just the facts” lit–they are swimming in tri-fold pamphlets. To break through, we flipped the idea on its head.
Where can you find the opposite of “just the facts”? A soap opera.
The plot thickens
Every healthcare worker will tell you: Those medical dramas you see on TV are nothing like the real thing. The exaggerated, over-the-top storylines are just that: Storylines. So for our target audience of medical professionals, we proposed the cure. How to cancel the soap opera? Routine Practice.
We leaned into the familiar and exaggerated world of ‘90s and early 2000s soap operas–complete with slow-motion urgency, obscure diagnoses, and intense background music–but with an unexpected plot twist that you wouldn’t expect: The patient has already been tested for hepatitis C. No panic. No emergency. Prevention, early detection, and easy treatment stopped the drama before it started.
A campaign without a cliffhanger
How many people read those pamphlets in doctors’ offices? Our ads were seen 7.3 million times. (That’s as many times as a glass of water is thrown in someone’s face in one season of a soap opera.)
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