DraftFCB

Tumbling Towards Success

DraftFCB

BRAND Flomax CLIENT Boehringer Ingelheim

In an era of zero tolerance for tchotkes and convention swag, trying to catch the eye of a physician is not an easy task, but that's the challenge DraftFCB faced when marketing the blockbuster benign prostate hyperplasia drug Flomax. "How do you possibly overcome the task of spinning something in such a wildly different direction, which is, at the end of the day, the exact same story you've told thousands of times before?" says Associate Creative Director Michael Kizilbash.

FROM LEFT: Beth Bour, senior account executive, Tim Hawkey, SVP/creative director, Sheri Rosenblatt, EVP/managing director, (BOTTOM) Michael Kizilbash, VP/associate creative director

During a brainstorming session, the team came up with the idea of using the interpretive dance group Pilobolus to act out the treatment's data points. "It was a big-ticket, non-traditional advertisement that required a bit of selling to the client," Kizilbash says. "All too often, good ideas get watered down from the original vision. This, if anything, went in the opposite direction." The video was cast on a huge screen with smaller screens scattered throughout the convention hall that showed snippets of the film to draw people into the booth to watch the full six-minute reel. Pilobolus was a huge success: Physicians made a beeline to the booth to see the choreographed contortionists in action and stayed to ask questions about the treatment and the dance troupe.