We created an organic social presence on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit for our target audience of Gen Z men who have hemophilia A, a rare bleeding disorder.

This project was created by a US biopharmaceutical company for a prescription medication. It was subject to review by internal medical/legal/regulatory teams at Genentech as well as the FDA.

Websites have long been the traditional destination for someone to learn important information about a healthcare treatment. But they often become a dumping ground for complex clinical and legal information. As a result, Gen Z only spends an average of 3 seconds on a healthcare product’s website, yet they spend 9 hours a week on TikTok. We needed to deliver important information about our product in a way that was relevant to our audience.​

Creating an organic social presence for a pharma brand with a boxed warning on TikTok was brand new territory, but the time was right to reimagine how pharma companies communicate with their audience. Social media isn’t just a platform for entertainment, it is a crucial medium that has the power to change how patients and rare disease communities create connections with one another.

This project was created by a US biopharmaceutical company for a prescription medication. It was subject to review by internal medical/legal/regulatory teams at Genentech as well as the FDA.

The audience was Gen Z men (patients) living with hemophilia A. We needed to educate them on HEMLIBRA, a first of its kind medication. We knew they only spend 3 seconds on a healthcare product’s websites, so we had to find a new way to deliver important product information.

We needed to educate our Gen Z hemophilia audience on HEMLIBRA, a first of its kind medication. We knew this audience spends an average of 3 seconds on a healthcare product’s website, while they spend 9 hours a week scrolling on TikTok. They also turn to TikTok as their primary search engine when wanting to learn about a product. We needed to find a way to take the important, complex information about HEMLIBRA and make it appealing to this hard-to-reach audience.

We created a new channel on a new platform (TikTok) that translated all of the key information about HEMLIBRA into wacky and outlandish content tailored to our audience. The videos were humorous, educational, and most importantly, fun to watch. The key to our success was that we didn't make HEMLIBRA ads for social media— we made social content that happened to be about HEMLIBRA. By creating a content destination that felt authentic to social media platforms, we created an entirely new resource for the Gen Z hemophilia A community to learn about this one-of-a-kind product. By keeping our posting cadence high, our content relevant, and our comment section open, they were watching, liking, and engaging with HEMLIBRA in ways they never had done before.

Our research showed that our Gen Z audience spent over 9 hours a week on TikTok, and over 60% of them engaged with social media pages focused on comedy and entertainment. They were also heavily influenced by the content they saw on these platforms. This guided us towards a humorous, entertaining, and of course, educational approach. By creating a content destination that felt authentic to the platform, we created a new resource for the Gen Z hemophilia A community to learn about this one-of-a-kind product.

It was important to establish a strong organic brand presence, which required a high frequency of video posts. This led to us shooting and producing over 15 videos a month, necessitating a constant stream of writing, producing, editing, and legal/regulatory approval that has not been done in pharma before. There was no model to execute an organic social presence for a boxed warning product, so we built our own. We produced and delivered over 500 video assets in just 8 months. The TikTok channel launched in April 2023 and continues to live and grow.

Since launch in April 2023, the channel has had over 99,000,000 views and reached over 81,000,000 people (for reference, only about 20,000 people in the US have hemophilia A). We’ve also had over 20,258 minutes of content watched––a pretty significant growth from the 3 seconds they spend on a healthcare product’s website. Most importantly, by leaving comments open, we’ve been able to engage with our audience directly, hearing first-hand what they’re loving (or hating) about our content. This hard-to-reach audience was not only was liking and commenting, they were following us, wanting to be the first to see more.