Heating up Pharma: Creating the First Outdoor Ad That Detects Your Fever

Health Care communication has a reputation for being boring. 

While the industry norm still relies heavily on traditional point of sale material and TV commercials featuring the inescapable product demo, we can find new ways to open up conversations with consumers and make science more engaging and relevant to their daily lives. 

Take the flu for example. 

In Poland, it’s typical to just ignore your flu symptoms, go to work anyway and make other people sick. A pity when it’s so simple to treat it. 

With Theraflu Poland, we seized the opportunity to change that attitude by making flu symptoms obvious to people in an entertaining and engaging way. 

The idea was to use a technology that had not been made available to the public before. 

Thermal imagery cameras have already been used in airports to screen passengers with fever. But with our Thermoscanner, for the first time, people could screen themselves for fever – one of the first symptoms of flu – and interact live with this technology. 

Passers-by can actually visualise their body temperature in full colour on a life-size outdoor ad, which tells them if they have a fever and offers them to treat it with Theraflu. That’s a great way to make people more engaged with their own health and encourage them to take action immediately. 

A fever is harder to ignore when it’s blinking red in your face! 

But that’s not all, as people don’t only interact with the outdoor ad itself but can also connect with digital and share their thermo selfie with the world – probably their boss to get excused from work. 

The device also directly connects to other useful tools that Theraflu Poland has in place, such as the Flu alert map. 

It’s a totally new and interactive way to talk about the flu that shows we can make science sexy and relevant. This could be achieved thanks to GSK’s will to innovate and strong network collaboration between Saatchi & Saatchi / Interactive Solutions Poland and Saatchi & Saatchi Geneva. 

We need to keep pushing for more creative solutions for Health Care, including in pharmacies and on packaging, some of the key media for purchase decision.

Marine Quéré is a Copywriter at Saatchi & Saatchi Switzerland