We leveraged a powerful consumer insight – sports fans are at a 2x greater risk of a heart event – to change opinions and get more Americans to assess their heart risks. We didn’t lecture, we leveraged a common frustration most loyal fans feel

By partnering with key sports broadcasters, we were able to seamlessly integrate our message into impactful media moments that became part of the game-day experience.

Bayer Aspirin is a serious weapon in the battle against heart disease, the number 1 cause of death in the US for men and women.

It can be a life saver for anyone with certain specific heart issues and is recommended by doctors for some of their patients as part of a daily regimen for helping to reduce a second heart attack.

Traditionally, Bayer Aspirin has focused heavily on reaching it’s core audience during American Heart Month in February, encouraging people to assess their cardiovascular risk factors.

In 2022 and 2023 however, it became apparent that consumers were becoming more reluctant to do so, contributing to the category wide decline in sales.

Bayer Aspirin needed to find a new way to connect with US consumers when it came to heart health.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the US.

Heart health simply isn’t top of mind for most people; the need to spend time, money, and effort visiting a doctor to assess heart-disease risk can be a barrier to taking early action.

In short, getting people to take an assessment of their heart-disease risk factors is a daunting task.

Aspirin’s objectives were:

Get people who are at risk to feel inspired, encouraged and motivated to do something about their heart health.

Get them to take action to assess their risk with our digital heart-risk assessment tool: CheckYourHeartRisks.com.

We identified a staggering piece of research: Sports fans are up to 2x more likely to experience a heart event when they are watching their home team play.

This statistic combined with other health, behaviour, and lifestyle data, helped identify a new audience likely to be at higher risk of cardiovascular disease: sports fans.

Our data point became the core of our campaign and gave Bayer Aspirin a way to deliver a potentially life-saving message not by using fear, but by tapping into what people are most passionate about – their favourite sports teams.

Aspirin would support fans who put their whole being into their fandom as the Official Sponsor of Fans’ Hearts.

Aspirin would support fans who put their whole being into their fandom as the Official Sponsor of Fans’ Hearts.

This platform would give us connection at scale with 75% of US consumers considering themselves sports fans, and 29% being avid sports fans.

To make the most of this we would identify key moments when passion/risk are at their highest.

Our strategy would focus on three key principles:

• Aspirin and fans’ heart health would take centre stage at the biggest national sports events across America.

• Credible sports talent (as well as fans) would demonstrate to the wider audience how watching sports can raise heart health risks.

• Key sports partners to make sure that Aspirin would be wherever there were fans.

In American Heart Month 2023, we’d make sure the focus was on the fans’ hearts and that fans were supported and encouraged to assess their heart-health risks.

We launched during the year’s biggest sports event, with TV ads during the Super Bowl in both teams’ home markets, Philadelphia and Kansas City.

We then partnered with NBC Regional Sports and Bally Sports to reach Basketball, Ice Hockey and Baseball fans. Live on-air heart monitoring segments called Heart of the Game, followed NBC regional sports broadcasters, and tracked their heart rate during some of the season’s most stressful games.

We also placed monitors on four NBA fans, who sat down post-game with a professional sports medicine doctor to analyse how the stress affected their heart. Cutdowns also ran across NBC and social.

We partnered with baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, surrounding their first game of the season via DOOH and print. Digital continued through the year.

Finally, we worked with GeniusMedia to launch a “sports crawler” on X during key hockey/ basketball games, intercepting real-time conversations about heart pounding moments.

True to our goal of getting fans to engage with and consider a challenging subject, our hero films sparked more feelings of empowerment than 88% of OTC ads.

In just 8 weeks, we saw:

• 130,000 visits to CheckYourHeartRisks.com

• 500% higher engagement with the assessment tool compared to Bayer Consumer Health norms

• Assessment completion rates 4X above our goal

• 261% longer time on site than Bayer Consumer Health benchmarks.

Even better, we drove action among the people who most needed it: 84% of people who completed the risk factor assessment were found to have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. *

Our highly engaging approach delivered huge business impact. Bayer Aspirin sales grew 6%, share increased by 1.4%. Our focus on key local markets also paid off with a 240%+ share growth.