McCann Health, Shanghai has picked up the top prize at the Cannes Lions pharma communications competition.
The annual awards held in the south of France have become a must-attend fixture in the calendar for advertising and communications creatives across many different sectors, including healthcare and pharma.
Judges at the awards are renowned for being hard to please, and often don’t award the top Grand Prix, which has been the case in the Pharma Lions category for the last two years.
However this year McCann Health, Shanghai’s work on the Breath of Life app for GSK impressed the judges enough to win the Grand Prix.
The McCann team collect their Grand Prix award
‘Breath of Life’ is a diagnostic tool for COPD developed for GSK, and is aimed at raising awareness and increasing diagnoses of the disease in China. The condition affects an estimated 100m adults in China, but only around 7% are properly diagnosed.
The app used the popular WeChat platform to allow users to breathe directly into their smartphones to produce a lung capacity reading.
The campaign drew creative inspiration from traditional Chinese ‘blowing-ink’ art, whereby the size of animated trees in the app grow to reflect the user’s lung capacity.
COPD is one of the top three causes of death in China and it’s terribly underdiagnosed and undertreated,” commented Robin Shapiro, TBWAWorldHealth, Global, and jury president of the category.
The agency and its client were applauded for combining Chinese blow art, with creative data visualisation, and mobile technology into one engaging and user-friendly diagnostic tool.
“This is highly personalised health engagement with scalable human impact and is the essence of life changing creativity which is what Cannes Lions Health is all about,” added Robin Shapiro.
Overall in the Pharma Lions category there were 363 entries from 23 countries, with 11 awarded with Lions – 1 Grand Prix, 2 Gold, 3 Silver and 5 Bronze Lions. These included two winners from the UK – Havas Lynx, Manchester’s HIV awareness campaign U=U= for Viiv Healthcare (silver) and Langland’s Smartread campaign for Bayer (bronze).