People living with HIV who are (1) recently diagnosed and ready to start treatment for the first time or (2) currently taking a treatment and seeking a new option. Mostly, young African-American and Latino men who sex with men (MSM).

Standard U.S. pharmaceutical regulations for products containing a black box warning.

The idea was based on a powerful insight: the human desire to love and be loved is something that becomes almost impossible to achieve when you have HIV. The stigma and shame that surrounds HIV is so devastating that people don’t even feel worthy of the very treatments that can help them live.

To launch DESCOVY, we had to help them see that who they are on the inside—their strength, their passion, their spirit—is beautiful. Because when you love what’s inside, you can live a healthy life with HIV.

Through simple, beautiful portraits, we revealed the inner qualities that make us unique and showed that true beauty lives inside each and every one of us. More importantly, we changed the conversation around HIV to health, helping people realize that having HIV doesn’t mean you lose your self-worth. And that the true power to choose health comes from within.

DESCOVY forms the backbone of a new family of HIV treatments. GENOVYA and ODEFSEY launched in the early spring of 2016, teasing the full campaign with the “Love What’s Inside” tagline and signature, black-and-white portraits. The full DESCOVY campaign, which tied all three products together under one umbrella campaign, launched in the fall of 2016.

Because the people we were trying to reach had yet to see themselves as being deserving of treatment, and were not actively looking for treatment-related information, the campaign found its audience in places they’d already integrated into in their daily lives (in HIV lifestyle magazines, on the websites they visit most) and on a new website experience designed for mobile-first.

Altogether, the Love What’s Inside campaign told a seamless story across multiple channels, inspiring people to break through the stigma of HIV and seek treatments that can help them live longer, healthier lives.

The results exceeded our best expectations. GENVOYA, the first treatment to launch, was the most successful launch in HIV history. And today the DESCOVY HIV treatments are the #1 prescribed treatments in the U.S.

Source: Ipsos Healthcare US Virology Monitor, Fieldwork Dates: Q4 2016, Sample Size: 204 doctors reporting on 4,084 patients, Methodology: All data collected online

The “Love What’s Inside” campaign is a story told seamlessly across multiple channels—from desktop and mobile websites to print ads and patient conferences—inspiring people living with HIV to feel deserving of a healthy life and seek treatments that can help.

At each touchpoint, “Love What’s Inside” modeled behaviors that people with HIV could emulate, and pulled through a visual language more commonly associated with beauty, wellness, and fashion. Bringing inspiring images of health into the HIV category for the first time, “Love What’s Inside” helped people with HIV to see through stigma and shame, to see beyond how they currently view themselves. The approach was to highlight the photography, making its unabashed beauty and vitality the centerpiece of the campaign. We also captured moving images to take full advantage of video in digital tactics like the websites and rich media, since motion could help tell a more impactful story.

Category reality: we’ve entered into a new era of HIV. Today’s treatments can help people live longer, healthier lives. However, millions of people living with HIV don’t know that. And even worse, the stigma that surrounds HIV makes them feel they don’t deserve health. Brand reality: even if we are able to motivate patients to seek care, many don’t know what’s inside their medicines or that a complete treatment consists of three different medicines. It’s a significant challenge, given complete treatments made with DESCOVY are actually marketed under different brand names.

To launch the DESCOVY family of HIV treatments, we needed to educate patients about their treatments—that what’s inside their medicine matters and, most importantly, that who they are matters and so does their health.