1. 9. 2022
At the beginning of September, the award ceremony for the most successful marketing campaigns in the IMC Czech Awards took place. The only awarded project with a health theme was the “Antibiotics” campaign, which was implemented by McCann Prague, Remmark and Engage Hill. It won the gold medal in the Public Procurement category.
In recent years, the topic of resistance of bacteria to the medicinal effects of antibiotics, so-called antibiotic resistance, has come to the fore. The situation is such that up to 33,000 people die every year in Europe as a result of resistant bacteria. In the Czech Republic, more people are already dying as a result of antibiotic resistance than as a result of traffic accidents. If this trend continues, some studies estimate that by 2050 it will be responsible for 10 million deaths a year, which would be more than cancer.
“Preventing the loss of the healing effects of antibiotics is something each of us can do, if we treat them responsibly. We will not actively demand them from doctors, we will stick to the recommended dosage and we will return any unused antibiotics to the pharmacy. And since it is logical that there is a link between antibiotic use and knowledge, we are glad that the State Institute of Health has decided to improve this situation through the awareness project “Antibiotics”,” explains Assoc. Helena Žemličková, M.D., Ph.D., Head of the National Reference Laboratory for Antibiotics and project guarantor. The project Prevention of Antibiotic Resistance (ZD-PDP2-001) was supported by a grant from the EEA Grants 2014-2021 under the Health Programme. www.eeagrants.cz
The success of the “Antibiotics” campaign, which won a gold medal in the IMC Czech Awards 2022, is built on appropriately and sensitively chosen comprehensive education. Given that antibiotics can only be legally obtained from a doctor in the Czech Republic, it would seem that doctors are the primary cause of the problem. However, patients often urge them to prescribe antibiotics. Therefore, in addition to education, the aim was also to promote people’s trust in doctors and their recommendations.
“The strategic decision was to find a solution in the form of an ideally a bit pushy but modern song that can appeal especially to a younger target group. This is because they had the highest awareness deficit according to our survey. We engaged Captain Demo to create the music and arrangement and Pokáče to write the lyrics according to the agency’s draft. We believed that we would attract attention with a fun and unconventional concept. And we were successful – the reaction of the younger generation was positive beyond expectations and thanks to the survey we have feedback that we managed to deliver the key messages,” adds David Palivec from the Remmark advertising agency.
Campaign results exceeded expectations
As already indicated, the survey was the tool that revealed the results of the “Antibiotics” campaign. Its first phase was carried out before the start of the project (in July 2021), the second after six months of the project (in February 2022). The survey provided interesting feedback. It showed that almost two thirds of the population (62.5%) had already encountered the topic of antibiotic resistance, which is 19% more than before the campaign was launched. The highest increase was in the group with primary education and also in the age group under 35.
An important finding of the survey is that 82% of people in the country already know that antibiotics are not effective against viruses.
The myth that antibiotics will reduce the treatment time for colds has been reduced in the majority of the population. Among young people under 25 years of age who believe this myth, it was a decrease from 52% to 33%, i.e. by 19 percentage points. 47.8% of respondents already report that in the last year they have received information about not taking antibiotics unnecessarily (an increase of 12.9 percentage points compared to the pre-campaign period). Most of the sources of this increase are “from TV advertising”, “on the internet or social media”, “in a leaflet or poster”.
The campaign, commissioned by the National Institute of Health and implemented by McCann Prague, Remmark and Engage Hill, has proven to shift perceptions of antibiotic resistance for the better.
Source: EngageHill & Nielsen Admosphere, ATB Resistance Survey, n=1008, February 2022