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If you’re Pfizer and you’re dedicating your first Super Bowl ad to fighting cancer, how do you get the message across without bringing down more than 100 million people across the country?
Crank up the Queen.
“One thing we have seen, particularly with our new agency partners at Publicis, is the power of music in creative,” said Drew Panayiotou, Pfizer’s global CMO. “The determination of doctors and researchers in treating patients and fighting cancer, something they often have is this perseverance—this ‘Don’t stop me, I’m going to keep going and find a cure”—and so the music is a great representation of that.”
Pfizer and its creative partners at Publicis Conseil and LeTruc/Publicis NY produced a 60-second ad airing in the third quarter of Super Bowl 58 that picks up Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” and uses it to reanimate the history of science. Those depicted in the portraits, sculptures, paintings, magazine covers, sepia-toned photographs and museum exhibits that begin lip syncing to Freddie Mercury include:
- Sir Isaac Newton
- Archimedes
- Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
- Pfizer founders Charles Pfizer and Charles F. Erhart
- Rosalind Franklin
- Copernicus
- Marie Maynard Daly
- Hippocrates
- Mary Somerville
- Galileo
- Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit
- Albert Einstein
- Dr. Katalin Karikó
If “Don’t Stop Me Now” could survive a zombie apocalypse, a season of American Idol and use in almond milk, makeup and Amazon 2019 Super Bowl ads, surely it could help viewers get to scenes of a child’s successful cancer treatment—and the prompt for Pfizer’s LetsOutdoCancer.com site. When Pfizer tested the ad with audiences, it landed in the top 25% of all Super Bowl ads aired since 2020 and Top 5 of 1,400 comparable pharmaceutical ads.
“[As] people learned the story and went through our digital experiences, they said it gives them hope that we will find a treatment for cancer,” Panayiotou said. “People said, ‘We now know this is very important for Pfizer’…and that’s why you go to the Super Bowl, to have people understand what the company is about and its future, and why it matters to them.”