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 often don’t know that there is an available modern long-term therapy for atopic dermatitis. Sanofi addressed this lack of information with the innovative patient activation campaign ‘Leben mit ND’ (‘Living with AD’). The aim is to empower inadequately controlled AD patients to question the status quo of their treatment and to inform them about modern treatment options via the patient website. Moreover, patients should perform a self-test on the website and ask a dermatologist about newer treatment options – which makes patients becoming an active part of the therapy decision-making process.

The CTAs are: “Take the self-test”, “Inform yourself about long-term treatment options for atopic dermatitis”, and “Ask your dermatologist about long-term treatment options”.

To draw attention to the patient website “leben-mit-neurodermitis.info”, Sanofi engages with the AD patient community via the Instagram channel “Leben mit Neurodermitis”. The patient website serves as a hub with different services for AD patients and information about AD. In the Instagram channel, we have been addressing topics that correspond to ND patients’ reality of life (e.g. family, sleep, sports, nutrition, skin care, diagnosis & treatment, stress & resilience) since the start of in 2021. In January 2023, we started to run dark ads and also play out new serial formats in the channel to meet the needs of the target group more specifically. e.g.:

- Derma-facts – facts or news about skin, neurodermatitis and treatments

- Expert-talk: patients can ask individual questions to experts (dermatologists, sleep experts, psychologists…)

- Check It Out – DER ND-CHECK: we encourage to check the own neurodermatitis status

- MimiMI Monday: THE MOAN format

The target audience are male and female patients with moderate to severe, insufficiently controlled atopic dermatitis. With the start of the new serial formats and dark ads in January 2023, the Instagram channel has expanded significantly both in terms of the content presented and the visibility achieved. The new serial formats and the dark ads have been able to both promote engagement and increase visibility. Furthermore, the new serial formats and the contents focus even more on strengthening the interaction between Sanofi and AD patients, and between AD patients themselves.

We implemented the first new serial posts in January 2023 on the Instagram channel “Leben mit ND” and placed monthly one post or story per serial format month.

After having launched our new serial formats and our dark ads in January 2023, we have been able to increase the number of followers: In the period from January 2023 until September 2023 from 9455 follower to 10645. The Instagram Engagement Rate was between 2.95% and 3.47% in this time. 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. We are by far the most successful Instagram atopic dermatitis channel with the largest community compared to competitors such as “Neurodermitis – wen juckt’s” with 799 followers in September 2023. Our success is due to the fact that we deliver the right and relevant content for the target group and thus manage to keep their engagement in the community high. Our numbers clearly show that Sanofi has succeeded in creating awareness for AD.