Psoriasis. Widespread depression, isolation, embarrassment, intimacy issues and professional constraints, taught us it’s more than a skin condition. It’s a human condition. Your body attacks itself, causing lesions and flares that cut to the heart. People stare; then avert their eyes when you try to make contact. Simple human touch becomes precious. But for the 1.7 MM people with psoriasis, there lacked an honest conversation about it. Everybody just talks about skin.

Enter Novartis Pharmaceuticals groundbreaking unbranded campaign, More to Psoriasis. Novartis’ objective was to create a platform where the people who lived the daily struggles could connect with each other, share experiences and help expose the reality of psoriasis is PsO much more. Where they could contribute real feelings and stories. And watch documentaries about the realities of daily life. Voting and social sharing amplified the message within the community and outside of it. Weekly RM communications deepened the healing. And pointed, insight-driven tools, online and off, helped people accurately and honestly communicate with doctors. Results have shown it’s begun to change the psoriasis discussion, while successfully positioning Novartis as the company that helps patients powerfully share their voice and show their desire to find better treatments.

The psoriasis community is highly active in digital channels. They over index in social media and turn to forums to connect with others. Therefore, our campaign was primarily digital. The website launched August 2014 and CPA and display media was activated shortly after to drive quality leads.

Polished, flashy design and marketing speak would be counterintuitive to what we felt the community wanted or would connect with. So to portray an organic, safe environment and user experience, the look, feel and design of the platform is purposefully and elegantly simple—as if created by the community itself. And large portions are in fact created by the community; members are in control of color backgrounds, drawings and tile messages throughout it. The docu-series was also created with the intention of not feeling overly produced, to portray real life in a real, authentic way.

Five months after launch, the campaign generated 13MM impressions and 78K website visits. 13% of visitors registered with our community, 3.5x better than Novartis’ benchmark. The PsO community has 4.3K registrations total, where 3.7K have voted on content and 360 have submitted stories on our homepage. Average time on site is 2 minutes 50 seconds, above the 2 minute benchmark at Novartis. The documentary videos outlining Huy’s daily struggle have been viewed more than 1.5K times.

The campaign had three key goals – create a powerful voice for PsO patients, build a database, and position Novartis as a partner that truly understands PsO patients and their condition. In addition to achieving the above metrics, More to Psoriasis got the attention of key influencers in the community who shared our campaign reaching 92K followers on Facebook and Twitter, one of them being the largest patient advocacy group, the National Psoriasis Foundation.