This is a patient information brochure i helped relaunch for zepzelca during my tenure at harrison/star

 During my tenure at Harrison/Star I had the privilege of working on our client ZEPZELCA, a prescription medicine used to treat adults with small cell lung cancer owned by Jazz Pharmaceuticals. The client came to us wanting to overhaul their patient information brochure, as they felt it was too clinical and needed to become more patient friendly. This required a revamp of both the art and copy, the latter of which I served the creative lead. Looking at the above cover, you can get a sense for the tone and feel my team aimed to create. Anyone who is familiar with small cell lung cancer and the patients ZEPZELCA was trying to reach knows that SCLC is a particularly aggressive and deadly form of cancer. It tends to impact patients later in life, and they would only be considered for treatment with ZEPZELCA if their chemotherapy was not working and the cancer had become metastatic. We knew that many of these patients would be in dire straits and out a point in their disease progression where they would feel like they were running out of options. My team concluded that the best strategy to take with this creative would be to focus on themes of calm and serenity. We wanted to give patients the message that ZEPZELCA is not some kind of last ditch effort to turn their treatment around, but rather the next logical step in the treatment journey they’ve already begun. I’ve included a couple of pages below to highlight, but if you’re interested in viewing the whole brochure you can find it at this link.

This page here on the left is an example of one of the major revamps we did to this piece. Since this brochure is targeted towards patients, we felt it necessary to break down some of the clinical language used to speak about SCLC into simple English. We went back and forth on the direction we should take this page in, since ZEPZELCA is a second-line treatment meaning patients have already undergone therapy at this point and have an understanding of what SCLC is and how it works. In the effort of respecting our readers intelligence and not speaking down to them, we decided the best move would be to keep this page brief and acknowledge they are not at the beginning of this difficult journey.

Another important part of our efforts to make this piece more patient friendly was finding a good way to effectively explain ZEPZELCA’s MoA. Working alongside the art department we created a visual that simply explained the timeline of how ZEPZELCA goes to work in the body to fight SCLC.

You can see the final version of that page here on the right. I’m a strong believer in the idea that great stories come in three parts: beginning, middle, and end. The simplicity of that lends itself to really effective communication that resonates with people. So breaking down the “story” of how ZEPZELCA works in the body into a three-act structure made it easy to explain to the patients reading the brochure. Paired with really great graphics designed by my AD partner Jeffrey Pienkos, this page became one of the highlights of the piece.

The final part of this piece that I want to highlight here is the following “helpful reminders” page. What started as an extra blank page turned into a new opportunity to humanize the brand and connect with patients in a way this piece had not before. Our idea when creating a page like this would be to show our brand’s empathy towards the patients that we treat and the situation they have found themselves in. By taking a moment to give them advice on the procedure they may soon find themselves undertaking, we are able to show ourselves as their advocate. The language used in this part took a quite a few rounds to get right. We were both trying to sympathize with the bad parts of what cancer treatment is like, while also trying hard to not focus on the negative and creating a peaceful tone. I think we ended up finding the perfect balance and you can read it for yourself below. Once again, if you’re interested in viewing the full piece please click this link!