With Video Testimonial Campaign, Generics Industry Aims To Not Be Taken ‘4GRxANTED’
Executive Summary
AAM hopes everyday voices – and Mark Cuban’s – will help policymakers appreciate the contributions that generic drugs make to the healthcare system. ‘We need to create an emotional connection,’ a campaign designer said.
The generics industry has a big problem: companies are providing drugs cheaper than ever, thanks in part to the limited number of wholesalers that distribute their products. But consumers are not seeing as much of those savings, mainly due to a shift in approach by pharmacy benefit managers toward formularies that value product rebates instead of the cost of the pills.
PBMs and other middleman “took $20bn out from our industry over the last six, seven years,” Amneal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. President and Co-CEO Chirag Patel said during a panel discussion at the recent Association of Accessible Medicines’ annual meeting in Orlando.
To staunch that bleeding, the generic industry will need policy solutions that favor generics in formularies and government payments, which will require a public pressure campaign on legislators and government officials.
Building momentum for those kinds of changes is a multi-step process. Sponsors might ask “why can't we just go out there and say to people, we the generics industry are being totally messed over by PBMs and by the wholesalers and we need your support,” said Rose Cameron, a partner at Martin Lindstrom AG, a branding firm working with AAM.
Policymakers and members of the public would respond, “Well, how does that benefit me again and who are you?” Cameron said. The firm’s research found that to prompt engagement “we need to create an emotional connection by triggering two different emotional sides, the inspirational side and the deprivation side. … And then we need to drive people to actions or reactions.”
The generic industry is “not top of mind,” Cameron said. “You are so deep in the subconscious. We need to pull you forward. And we need to associate you with other things that we take for granted that are critical.”
What People Take 4GRxANTED
To build that connection, AAM is launching an awareness campaign that pushes people to make videos about things they take for granted (examples offered at the launch event ranged from Mexican food to an aging mother-in-law). Every video posted will support a donation of medicine to the humanitarian organization Direct Relief.
The design of the website where AAM wants people to post their videos, https://4grxanted.org, takes advantage of the shared letters in “granted” and “GRx,” a common industry abbreviation for generic prescriptions.
“We don’t have the hundreds of millions of dollars that other industry groups use to draw attention to our medicines and our issues, but what we do have are hundreds of millions of patients who are able to access more affordable lifesaving and health-maintaining medicines because of the generic and biosimilar industry,” AAM Interim CEO David Gaugh said in a statement.
“Engaging these Americans to facilitate the donation of generic medicines to those in need is an effective and humanitarian way to shine a light on this industry’s unparalleled contributions to health care in the U.S. and its already robust charitable contributions to communities across this nation,” he said.
‘Not Easy But Also Incredibly, Incredibly Possible’
Much of the kick-off for the campaign was heartfelt and effective, with people discussing what they’ve taken for granted, from a father who died unexpectedly to a niece at Michigan State University, the site of a recent mass shooting.
But the event also included some more typical corporate theatrics. At one point, a speaker moved through the audience talking about how to activate oxytocin and comparing the industry to Gandhi.
Of course, building the campaign will depend on much more than the quality of presentations in a hotel ballroom in Orlando.
“For those of you who don't work in the branding space, you may find that the road to reputation and awareness might be a little crooked,” said Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. VP-North America Brand & Communications Kelley Dougherty. “It may not be pounding someone on the head and saying listen to me talk to you today about the generics industry until you fall asleep.”
“That is not the point here,” Dougherty said. “The point here is to grab everyone by the lapel, get them interested in something, get them passionate about something and then … creating an army of individuals that are going to stand up for what we believe in, so to prompt people to think and to talk about things that they take for granted in their lives.”
Creating a ground swell of public interest is “not easy, but also incredibly, incredibly possible with the power that we all have in this room and inside ourselves,” she added. Once people “appreciate the need and support the industry that makes these medicines they rely on all day, every day with their families, we can then turn them into the best … marketers that we that we can imagine.”
Linking the videos to medicine donations is a critical part of the campaign, according to Maryll Toufanian, Amneal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. senior VP-regulatory strategy and policy, who joined the company in October after almost 13 years at the FDA. Not only will people who reflect on what they take for granted “have that emotional connection of sharing their story. They will be in action.”
Mark Cuban, The Not-So-Secret Weapon
The campaign will have three phases over the course of 2023. The first will focus on soliciting videos from industry, the second on patients and consumers, with the third stage focusing on international partners and physician and patient influencers. (See box for details on the campaign's phases.)
Included in the first phase is “celebrity or HC influencers,” one of which the campaign has already found in entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and a star of ABC’s Shark Tank, where he often has to kindly break the hearts of gadget makers looking for funding.
Cuban’s appearance at the Access! annual meeting made the generics industry’s day, though. He discussed his online pharmacy, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, and afterwards entertained the snaking line of fans who wanted a picture with him.
“I've never put my name on any other company, and I thought it was important because we were the upstarts,” Cuban said during a fireside chat with Christine Baeder, AAM’s new board chair and Teva senior VP and chief operating officer-US generics and biosimilars.
“We were coming out of nowhere, and I wanted people to know I was committed to it financially, emotionally, and intellectually, and also wanted patients to know they could trust it, that I wouldn't put my name on it unless I was fully behind it,” Cuban said.
The generics industry is clearly taken with Cost Plus Drug’s middleman-eschewing business model. This is the second year in a row the annual meeting has included a speaker from the firm; CEO Alex Oshmyansky was on a panel about the sustainability of the generics business model last year.
Entrepreneur Mark Cuban joins AAM's awareness campaign
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Cuban also recorded a video for the new AAM social media campaign, which now sits at the top of the 4GRxANTED site. Campaign organizers said Cuban encouraged them to tag him in posts about the project. Cuban’s participation is the “lift we would actually love to have from an influencer at the early phase of this campaign,” Dougherty said, “although we may look at a more broad-based influencer strategy moving forward.”
Were Cuban to actively promote the campaign, it could have considerable reach. He has 8.8 million Twitter followers, and his feed is increasingly focused on drug pricing issues.
Regardless of what Cuban does, the campaign's success likely will hinge on how many videos are produced and the reaction they elicit from policymakers.
“Don't worry about the quality right now,” AAM Senior Director of Marketing Erica Klinger told attendees. “We’re looking for quantity. We want to seed our social channels on the website. Even a five second video of you saying something is going to count towards the donation.”