To be straight with you guys, we never imagined any interesting creative work coming out of the Walgreens Boots Alliance.
But the latest spot from WPP’s Team WBA is a bit of a curveball as it focuses on women suffering through cancer together and collectively telling that disease to go fuck itself.
It’s all about solidarity in survival. The music choice by Sydney’s Sampa the Great is pretty interesting too.
While Team WBA is officially a WPP joint, Grey handles creative with MediaCom on planning and buying strategy.
The purpose of this campaign, which launched at the beginning of the week, is to promote Feel More Like You™, Walgreen’s new service specifically for patients living with cancer that just launched nationally at 3,000 locations. It was developed in collaboration with Cancer Support Community and Look Good, Feel Better Foundation. The idea, as you might deduce from the ad, is to combine prescription treatments with OTC products like health and beauty to address the side effects of the disease.
Since the topic is cancer and we are difficult people, we do feel obligated to mention the client’s tobacco problem.
On the same day the campaign launched, the FDA publicly announced that Walgreens sells more tobacco products to minors than any other pharmacy chain, stating that it “wants to meet with the company to discuss its tobacco and e-cigarette sales policies.” The company told CNN that it officially forbids such sales and will work to reduce the visibility of tobacco products in some stores.
Competitor CVS and its PR firm, Edelman, made a very big show of ceasing all tobacco sales in 2014.
All these complications aside, we liked the ad.