AstraZeneca (AZN) has launched a new marketing campaign for its Breztri inhaler, targeting asthma patients for the first time after years of COPD-focused advertising.
The campaign marks a significant shift, as Breztri had previously been FDA-approved and marketed exclusively for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Creative agency Edelman developed the campaign, its first work for Breztri, moving deliberately away from the lifestyle-driven tropes common in pharmaceutical advertising.
“We had a very clear goal to not make just another pharma campaign,” said Brian Wood, Edelman’s senior vice president and group creative director.
The campaign’s central concept features an AI-generated llama, derived from the acronym LAMA, which stands for Long Acting Muscarinic Antagonist, one of Breztri’s three active components.
Katie Pansegrau, AstraZeneca’s senior director of marketing, said the wordplay emerged naturally during the creative process, describing it as an opportunity to make complex science feel approachable for patients.
“We can make something that seems very scientific more light-hearted, more accessible and more educational, so patients feel like they understand the treatment,” Pansegrau explained.
The asthma patient population skews considerably younger than COPD sufferers, which has driven greater investment in social media placements alongside connected TV, YouTube, and display advertising.
Media buying for the campaign is being handled by Omnicom’s HealixGlobal, with the full campaign running across a broad mix of digital and streaming channels.
Pansegrau described the core strategic challenge as cutting through significant media noise to reach and educate asthma patients about triple therapy treatment options available to them.
“How do we break through that noise to make sure that we are advocating for those patients and reaching them?” she said, adding that the llama concept was the answer.
Wood said that using AI rather than traditional CGI gave the creative team considerably more flexibility to experiment with different visual approaches during production.
“We even went as far as to do multiple takes for each scene,” Wood said, noting that AI unlocked possibilities that would have been far more constrained under conventional production methods.
“Following proven production processes and continuing to leverage AI as this really powerful tool unlocks so many more possibilities in how we execute,” he added.
AstraZeneca’s existing Breztri COPD advertisements have also been updated to include notices informing viewers that the treatment is now approved for asthma maintenance use.