Our client (Novartis) markets EXTAVIA, a treatment for people in the early stages of MS. Most of these people are generally quite young - some diagnosed as early as their late twenties.

Our brief was to inform and help newly diagnosed patients to know when and how to inject EXTAVIA. And to somehow make life easier and better for EXTAVIA patients, everywhere.

The EXTAVIA app is a free mobile application that goes along side every prescription of EXTAVIA. It helps their patients know when and where to inject, remembers their hospital appointments, helps them keep an MS diary (they can share this with their HCPs if they want) as well as organising their day-to-day life.

By helping EXTAVIA patients organise not just their MS needs, we help them fit their treatment around their life and not vice versa.

We worked with our in-house teams and animation company (Beakus) and our client (Jonas) to make every aspect of our story as warm and genuine as possible. We imagined ourselves as people with busy lives who also had to contend with MS and discussed how the app would help us in that situation.

We unanimously decided that our story should be told by the kind of patient who would most benefit from the app, a busy working mum with MS. Co-creating both our patient (Sarah) and the personification of our app (App), we worked to keep our message clear: You are more than your illness, and we know that what you often need most is a helping hand.

Not only is the final story true to the campaign (it was after all inspired by it), it is being told by the kind of person we are trying to help.

The impact it’s had in Novartis internally has been profound.

It has reinvigorated attitudes to patient support, and we have now been tasked with developing more ways to help EXTAVIA patients. Watch this space…