Abigail M. Waters

— PROJECT NAME

Campaign Concepts


— ROLE

Copywriter


— CATEGORY

Oncology (Ovarian)

DTC

Our client was getting ready to test launch campaigns for their drug with a unique mechanism that works alongside taxane chemotherapy to increase the overall survival of women with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. The brand promise? Product X gives you a survival advantage against PROC, helping you to continue moving forward with resilience.


Initially, two concepts stuck, and my partner and I came up with a third after the first review with the client. Note: these concepts did not go into production.


The final products are below—then we’ll get into how they came to be.

Tools like Figma and Miro are my preferred method for collaborative brainstorming. Even zoomed out all the way, this is only half of my team’s initial thoughts.

Ideas come from different sources:

- Social listening (Reddit, forums, TikTok)

- Internal research, like patient interviews

- External research, like natural history studies

- Personal experience

- Fine arts (the work of textile artist Bisa Butler to the right)


Here’s a patient quote that touched me, and led to the development of one of our concepts:


“For a lot of people with metastatic cancer, this is the life. It’s getting a treatment that works and then having progression and then getting a treatment that works and then having progression. It’s all about putting together as much time as possible from a variety of treatment options, and just hoping there is always another option when you need one. It is a sucky way to live in many ways ways. But its all we got.”

For the concept Tapestry of Treatment, we wanted to show the different stages of life in an illustrative fashion. In research, we learned that women with ovarian cancer often have artistic hobbies like painting or weaving.


We explored a lot of layout and copy variations, using prototyping sped along by generative AI to get the right combinations. In social listening, we also learned that women with ovarian cancer form strong connections with each other, so we considered single-subject vs group compositions.

We came close with this one, but there were still some changes to make. The woman was feeling a bit boring, or “soft” as our CD would say. The body copy needed to be tightened, too.

For the concept Attitude Shift, we landed on a visual execution early on, but the main challenge was in the copy. Did we have a literal, product-focused headline? No, that could be impossible to get MLR-approved. “How do I show up?” is nice, and it says a lot about the inner strength of woman with PROC, but is it product-focused enough?


Eventually, we settled on narrowing this idea of this concept in on choice. Women can choose how they want to show up during this really challenging moment, and they can make choices about their treatment. Choice is especially powerful here because Product X is biomarker-agnostic, meaning women don’t need a specific genetic profile to be eligible.


Finally, while we loved this polished studio photography, the client preferred a more humanistic approach. We brought in more realism to the photography and added a group, which you saw in the final images up top.

Finally, the concept Encore actually began as Ovation—a standing ovation. We initially approached this idea from the perspective of wanting to approach death more directly than typically seen in pharma advertising, something my partner was particularly inspired by.


While throughout development we pulled back on this idea, it showed us that strong conceptual ideas can often come from places you wouldn’t normally dare to go. It’s easier to edit than add, after all.

Our initial idea for this concept was to have the curtains of the encore framing the whole scene, with the hero walking into the scene. But this felt too impersonal and cold, and we switched the composition and integrated the curtains—but maintaining some of the surrealist element.


The copy also underwent a big change, and we moved away from this literal headline to ones that were more contextual and had a greater sense of tension.