With past marketing efforts on PREVENAR13 (a conjugate vaccine to prevent invasive pneumococcal disease), Pfizer Malaysia had successfully established itself as a pioneer and strong advocate in the fight against the communicable and fatal disease, but only for children. Absence of propagation of the burden of pneumococcal disease among elderly by the public health authorities and healthcare professionals (HCPs) resulted in no media attention on both its incidence among adults and the availability of a vaccine for adults. Therefore, Malaysians continued to think that only children needed protection against this deadly disease.

Preserving Moments that Matter with PREVENAR13

We kicked off with ‘Ball of Life’, which was essentially an ordinary man and 6 feet of plastic that set out to tell the story of a grandson who lost his grandmother to pneumococcal disease. Showcasing the emotional impact of a real pneumococcal disease sufferer, Pfizer rolled the ‘Ball of Life’ from town to town creating awareness, educating and encouraging people to proactively adopt protection from the disease through vaccination. It was designed to be a movement that enlisted public participation with a pledge campaign to ‘proactive prevention’ with PREVENAR13 by exhorting them to sign their names on the ‘Ball of Life’. Pfizer Malaysia set a target of inspiring at least 3,000 pledges. Pfizer decided to give their pledges a tangible meaning and impact by committing to contribute RM 15,000 for the pledges to the Lung Foundation of Malaysia for improvement of care and treatment standards (if we achieve this target).

For a product category that usually takes at least 3-6 months to see the full sales uptake, PREVENAR13 started to show notable positive sign of sales several weeks after the launch.

***Got Media Attention & Propagation

The campaign generated a PR value worth RM 726,786. Not only did Pfizer Malaysia successfully achieve the marketing objectives of raising the awareness among public on the importance of pneumococcal disease prevention through mass media publicity, the “Ball of Life” activation which dramatized the emotional impact of pneumococcal disease also effectively increased the urgency and made the public take action.

***Generated participation & engagement

The ‘Ball of Life’ generated huge participation from the consumers, achieving 11,376 pledges, almost 4x times the target of 3000 pledges, in just 10 days!