Cologuard Entertain in America’s Toughest Category

This is an unusual Ad Of The Week – it’s the first time ever we’ve picked a 1-Star ad! Cologuard’s ad isn’t bad, though, it’s just that it’s in a category – Drugs and Medications – where a negative emotional reaction is the norm. In fact, colon cancer screener Cologuard scores exactly average on Star-Rating for its sector.

The fact is that thinking about serious disease and medication simply does not make audiences feel positive emotions. 92% of medication ads end up with 1-Star on our Test Your Ad platform. Even if you fill your ad with humour, celebrities, and other elements that can drive positive sentiment up, the category is heavily regulated. You have to mention drawbacks and side effects, and that’s going to create negative feelings just like the illness itself does.

So if you’re a brand operating in this category, what can you do to be effective? Cologuard offers a really good example of an ad which pushes against the category’s constraints and gets at least some benefit from it.

The important thing to remember is that those positive elements may not help with overall positive sentiment for a pharma ad, but they can make an ad seem more interesting, exciting and intense. And they can make it more memorable. Those things have a major payoff too, in terms of the other measures we look at for Test Your Ad – short-term Spike Rating and Brand Fluency, which measures rapid recognition of a brand.

Before we look at the actual results, let’s review what Cologuard are actually doing in this ad. It’s a collaboration with the highly successful Real Housewives franchise – the new season of Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City kicks off on the 15th September. Cologuard have recruited the housewives to chat in an entertaining way about how medical advice for women is to get checked out for colon cancer when you hit 45. Not easy, though, when you’ve claimed to be 44 three years in a row! The ad then switches to the claimed benefits of Cologuard itself as an at-home screener (though not advised for high-risk groups, who should just get the check up).

So the ad is using celebrities and humour to make a very grim subject (colon cancer) more entertaining. But the structural issues around pharma ads drag it down. However, when it comes to short-term and brand recognition measures, the approach is a winning one.

Cologuard scores a Strong score on short-term Spike Rating, putting it in the top 10% of medication and drug ads we’ve tested. Its 93% Brand Fluency score is also strong, and only 4% of medication ads reach that level. This is a seriously impressive performance for the category – which is why it’s our Ad Of The Week.

The lesson for brands in this most difficult sector is – don’t be scared of entertaining your audience! Even if it can’t overcome the structural difficulties in the category, it can still boost emotional response and make ads more memorable, leading to big short-term impact. We may be waiting a long time for the first 5-Star Medication ad, but brands like Cologuard are pushing us closer.