Atopic Dermatitis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease causing recurrent eczematous lesions and severe itching which often leads to a significant reduction in quality of life. Despite this high burden of disease, AD patients are often not aware of new treatment options. Sanofi addressed this lack of information with the innovative patient activation campaign ‘Leben mit ND’ (‘Living with AD’). The aim of the campaign is to educate patients with AD about their disease and to empower them to question the status quo of their treatment. Patients should also become proactive, if possible, and ask their dermatologist about newer treatment options and thus be part of the therapy decision-making process. The CTA is: Ask your dermatologist about long-term-solutions.

We used insights from our target group (e.g. social media usages & attitudes, consumer information, surveys) to perform micro segmentation identifying precision marketing segments for our target group based on their interests: beauty/wellness/care, clothing, conscious diet, food, stress, and conscious health. We then tested the impact of the these micro-segments and the impact of personalized creatives and messages for validation by testing them against a control group. After the validation, we built two storylines around topics relevant to the micro segments. Based on these storylines, we produced short Youtube and Facebook videos, and were thus able to engage with the target group in a precisely tailored way.

Our insights from our target group (patients of any age with atopic dermatitis who are treated either by their primary care physician or dermatologist and whose AD is not adequately controlled) helped us to identify sub-segments for media targeting. The funnel strategy included digital video (YouTube), social (Facebook) and display, directing user to the patient website “leben-mit-neurodermitis.info”. This patient website is the heart of the broader campaign serving as a hub with different services for AD patients and information about AD (e.g. self-test, dermatologist finder, blog article from people affected, learning platform, download center for informative brochures).

The results clearly show that Sanofi succeeded in entering the reality of AD patients’ lives with this programmatic campaign. Starting in Oct 2022, we have been able to achieve 120 million total impressions on YouTube and Facebook with over 11 million completed video views. The Click-Through-Rate which was at times above 3% (which is above the industry benchmark) clearly shows that Sanofi has succeeded in creating awareness for AD. We saw a clear increase in traffic to the website and about 30% of the total traffic came through the programmatic campaign. The high use of the self-test on the website provides clear evidence that we succeeded in creating awareness and triggering potential for treatment and behavior change.