The Campaign

The Vein Guy is a Japanese smartphone application conceived, developed, and recently launched by AstraZeneca in support of its cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor. Its objective is to promote adherence. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have been trying to solve the non-adherence problem for years, across every imaginable therapeutic area. However, even in the pre-digital age, the one-way communication of an adherence message on a waiting room poster has never been effective. The Vein Guy takes a brand new approach to promoting adherence. Whereas waiting room posters tend to be serious and educational in tone, The Vein Guy is engaging and fun. Waiting room posters leverage a single touchpoint; The Vein Guy engages with you when you need him most: at the time you usually take your medicine. Waiting room posters deliver a single message meant to motivate a large number of people; The Vein Guy is ready with hundreds of messages to motivate a single patient, one-on-one. This is the most legitimate and authentic application of gameification that we're aware of in the pharmaceutical industry.

The Brief

The goal of the Vein Guy app is to make a major change for the good in the adherence behavior of patients by leveraging the principles of gameification.

Creative Execution

When logging in for the first time, you answer a few questions to categorize your behavioral type. Next, you create your own Vein Guy by customizing every aspect of his appearance, or click the “Random” button until you find a character you like. He shows up every morning at a time you specify to ask if you’ve taken your medicine. Say yes and you get a stamp on your calendar; say no and you get an adherence tip. You rate every message with a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down.” This lets us analyze which messages work best per behavioral type, for better customization in updates. Surprises keep the experience fun and exciting. After several days in a row of adherence, the Vein Guy might throw you a party. Shake your device, and the Vein Guy gets dizzy. You’re never certain what to expect, and that’s the key to stickiness.

The Vein Guy has just been born. Although he’s been designed to give us effectiveness metrics, and the early data indicate that we meeting or exceeding our KPIs, it’s too soon to report on them with sufficient accuracy. However, one unexpected result so far has been the adoption of The Vein Guy by AstraZeneca’s global Crestor marketing team. They are so impressed with his incorporation of gameification principles to promote adherence that they’ve decided to introduce him around the world. The Vein Guy is currently learning Spanish, Chinese, English…every language he needs to be effective around the world.

People engage with their smartphones all day long, and in Japan, the rates of smartphone usage are the highest in the world. In general, the objective of using a smartphone isn’t to become educated about something. The point is to be engaged and have a little fun, and if you learn something along the way, so much the better. That’s why an app has such rich potential to promote adherence. The “sharp end of the stick”—the function that actively promotes adherence—is essentially an alarm function. But the vast majority of the programming and creative effort is around “stickiness.” Adherence is a long-term behavior that requires a little reminder or motivation every day, so an app that’s sticky enough can do a million times more good than a poster. So we devoted a tremendous amount of attention to making The Vein Guy visually appealing, interesting, and just plain likeable.