Finalist
Pharma & Medical-Craft
Performance/Casting

The intended primary audience for Friedreich’s Back is people living with FA and their caregivers. The FA patient community is intelligent, inspiring, and not interested in traditional advertising.

After being diagnosed with an ultra-rare terminal disease in their teens, they feel deeply isolated, and have a hard time trusting doctors who often don’t even know what FA is.

When the first treatment was launched, they were skeptical at best. SKYCLARYS isn’t a cure, it only slows the progression of a disease that will still take away their ability to walk and speak.

This patient community turns to social media to learn from others with the disease and are known for leaning on dark humor to cope with a devastating diagnosis.

So, we needed to create a social media series that would help patients come together to learn about SKYCLARYS and laugh in the face of their FA.

SKYCLARYS faced a unique challenge: it’s the first ever treatment proven to slow down their terminal disease, but patients didn’t want to try it. Because FA is so rare, knowledge was lacking, and patients didn’t trust their doctors. But we knew that patients did trust social media, using it to connect with others with FA. We also found out they used dark humor to cope with their disease.

So, we developed Friedreich’s Back to give patients an expert they could trust, and something they could laugh at.

People with Friedreich ataxia (FA) needed an expert they could trust to help them understand the benefits of FA’s first ever treatment, SKYCLARYS.

So, we dug the guy who discovered the disease up from the grave (Nikolaud Friedreich) and used his excitement about SKYCLARYS as the basis for Friedreich’s Back, a 9-episode comedy series that educates people on the benefits of treatment.

Leaning into the dark humor that the FA patient community is known for, we used comedy as a vehicle for product information, giving patients an expert they could trust, information they could retain, and laughter that they desperately needed.

Each of the 9 episodes infused product messaging into dark comedy, helping people retain information. We then released it on social media to reach patients in a more inviting way, making it feel less like advertising and more like entertainment, helping patients come together and make informed treatment decisions—through laughter.

For a disease with only 15,000 people worldwide, Friedreich’s Back had 2 million views on social in the first 3 weeks, including tens of thousands of organic views. At the time of submission, we’re at 10 million views across TikTok and Meta, which, if you’re following, is about 600 times the entire patient population.

But, most importantly, we achieved our goal of making people consider treatment with SKYCLARYS, with over 6,000 conversions to the SKYCLARYS website, which is more than the total number of Americans living with FA.

This led to a rise in prescriptions, an increase in revenue for Biogen, and most importantly, more changes within the patient community, who were now finally informed enough to begin treating their disease for the very first time.