Red Door’s hepatitis campaign wins top PR prize
pharmafile | November 26, 2003 | News story | |Â Â Â
Red Door Communications has scooped several top prizes at the prestigious PR Week Awards including one for its hepatitis B campaign 'B' Safe.
The agency won the ethical healthcare category at the awards for its campaign on behalf of vaccine company Aventis Pasteur MSD and Sorted, a sexual health service from the Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust, as well as CLASH an outreach group based in Camden and Islington.
The remarkable campaign aimed to raise awareness of vaccination against Hepatitis B among homosexual men, one of five of whom have been infected by the disease.
The agency was set the target of increasing vaccination rates by 10% over six months in 2002, and used a number of promotional materials to engage its audience. The campaign's eye-catching range of materials included posters, books of matches, condoms and even margarine tubs – a pun on the disease's 'spreadablility' – filled with freebies.
Credit card-sized information leaflets were also made available in bars to convey the fact that hepatitis B is 100 times more infectious than HIV.
B Safe was launched at Purple in the Park, a leading gay and lesbian event, which boasted a temporary on-site Sorted clinical. Interest was further stimulated with a B Safe float at the London Mardi Gras. In tandem with this a mailing was sent to healthcare professionals explaining the campaign.
Catherine Devaney, Associate Director at Red Door, said: "One of the challenges that we faced was communicating with our target audience in a social environment so we couldn just develop the usual patient information that you would see in a GP surgery. It had to be very specific to the audience and targeted to the time that they would be reading it.
Runner-ups were the Red Consultancy for work on launching Eli Lilly's erectile dysfunction treatment Cialis which helped increase patient requests for the drug through its media campaign.
