The creative revolution inside the worlds most dull category - Novartis CMO

**Jon Evans** (0:00)
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another special edition of the podcast in partnership with BCG. Now, in this episode, we're going to be talking about a Grand Prix winning campaign. Now, not just any campaign, because this was from Novartis in the pharmaceutical category, which is, we know from System One Data, one of the world's dullest.
How did they do it? How did they transform the business to be more creative? And what were the results? And importantly, did AI play a role in it? So I'm joined by the CMO, Gail, in this episode, alongside Janet from BCG, to uncover all the secrets and so you can learn from what they've just done. Here we go.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Uncensored CMO. It's great to see you both. How are you?

**Janet Balis** (1:27)
Great, thank you so much.

**Gail Horwood** (1:28)
Doing very well, thanks.

**Jon Evans** (1:30)
It's kind of, there's kind of a nice full circle moment here because two years ago at Cannes, Adam Morgan and I did a presentation called The Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull.
And we got a call from Novartis saying, oh, will you come and do the presentation at our place? Because we've heard it's quite interesting. And Adam and I were going, this could be a bit awkward. Because we actually looked at the dullest categories in the world. And Pharma was the dullest category. So we're like, how's this going to go down? But it actually went down brilliantly. We had an amazing time with your team.
And now, of course, you're back here and you're accepting, you won two? Is that all right?

**Gail Horwood** (2:10)
We won two Cannes Lions in the Grand Prix for integrated campaign in Pharma.

**Janet Balis** (2:15)
So three years later.

**Gail Horwood** (2:16)
Isn't that amazing?

**Janet Balis** (2:17)
Congratulations.

**Jon Evans** (2:18)
Well done.

**Gail Horwood** (2:18)
Thank you so much.

**Jon Evans** (2:20)
So tell us a bit about the journey from where you've come from to this point and what's changed.

**Gail Horwood** (2:24)
Sure. I mean, and you were part of that journey and so many other talented people, because we've made creativity and creative effectiveness central to our marketing philosophy. We believe marketing is the science of behavior change and creative effectiveness in the work you put into the market matters. And we decided to do a systematic approach to training our entire marketing organization on what makes great creative. What is, what are the elements, the formula, et cetera. And part of that is putting a mirror to your own work and saying what could be better.
And you helped us make that change by pointing out that some of the work we've put into the market isn't the most exciting. And we want to be relevant and we want to be information people act upon because it matters. It's changing their lives for the better. And so we've been on a multi-year journey. We developed a program called Create, and it's not a one and done. It's something we dedicate resources to.
And in fact, visiting Cannes, we work with Cannes Advisory and do curated walk the work and spend a lot of time in the Palais really interrogating other people's work so we can make our own work better.

**Jon Evans** (3:35)
I think, I mean, Janet, I reckon that Gail and the team are in the minority here because I mean, how many people actually go and check the workouts?

**Janet Balis** (3:42)
It's extraordinary. I think the notion of going to the Palais is a pretty rare idea for people here.

**Jon Evans** (3:48)
I mean, more people should follow your lead, I think.

**Janet Balis** (3:49)
I agree.

**Gail Horwood** (3:51)
First of all, it's instructive. Imagine seeing the best marketing work in the world, the best campaigns in the world. And another thing we've done is we've invited our interagency team, the creatives across our networks to come with us. So there's no competition. We're all there to talk about what makes work better. We get educated. And then for me, what's most exciting about it, because not everybody gets to come to Cannes, is we do work when we get back, it's an obligation of those that were here to host an event, which a very clever team member of ours called, we're in East Hanover, New Jersey. He called it East Canover.