Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is a condition that causes trouble swallowing. It’s a complicated disease— tricky to diagnose, hard to say, and even harder to live with. So we created a cast of friendly and relatable animated characters to provide guidance and help educate people about EoE.

The Adventures of the EsophaCrew website shows how these characters deal with this complex and relatively new medical condition. The fun, informative website educates people through animated videos, educational comics, and interactive resources to learn the lingo and facts about the disease.

The objective of creating this website was to help educate people, make them feel understood, and give them a sense of urgency to move forward. The goal was to make folks dealing with EoE symptoms to feel confident in following up with their physician. By validating what they're feeling, we hoped to drive them to a physician to seek answers.

Market research testing told us the animated cartoon approach of the EsophaCrew was highly relatable. Patients said the humorous tone of the illustrated work struck a positive and empathetic chord. They found the dramatized visuals of food becoming stuck in throat to be clear, clever, and very memorable. Seeing people having trouble swallowing at social events and using workarounds or food hacks to cope helped them connect with their past experiences. Qualitative research also told us that the cartoon format of the EsophaCrew stood out and drove a sense of urgency to talk to a doctor.

In order to create the website and campaign, SSW partnered with Linetest in Vancouver to refine the characters. Together we developed three one minute videos for the website, a series of educational comics, and a campaign of engaging web banners which helped drive traffic to the EsophaCrew website. This unbranded disease awareness website also provided resources for patient support and drove sign-ups for an EsophaCrew e-newsletter. After getting people to register on the website, they received a series of fun and informative emails from our CRM campaign. Gus and the EsophaCrew kept patients engaged and informed so that they would be aware of a new treatment for EoE once it was approved by the FDA.

Since launching in March 2021, the Adventures of the EsophaCrew website's highly engaging design and content has achieved some outstanding performance metrics:

• 8x Longer average session duration than the industry average (over 10 minutes longer)

• 2.5X Higher pages viewed per session rate than the industry average

• 46% Lower bounce rate compared to the industry benchmark

The EsophaCrew website and videos have also earned some impressive

industry accolades, already winning 12 awards.