Our client has a problem. As is the case with many medicines, vaccines and healthcare products, patient compliance drops off before they have completed the recommended course of therapy.
The real challenge was this: as the therapy is decades old, the ‘compliance problem’ had become white noise, a known issue but without a driving need to find a solution. Our client wanted us to find a way to make an old issue feel immediate, solvable, and current.
While many pharmaceutical companies are aware of the need for agility, by virtue of their size such an approach can be difficult to achieve. We suggested an alternative: we would utilise the Havas family as a parallel network, able to pull together quickly something reactive and solution-driven, to kick-start the problem solving process.
We brought in the intellectual and creative big guns, and a month later after receiving the go-ahead from the client, we held the first Medici Workshop in London’s HKX building.
But before we dive into the details, let’s go back a few centuries, to the melting pot of Renaissance-era Florence. In The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson outlines how the patronage of artists, poets, philosophers and scientists by the wealthy Medici family was one of the driving forces behind the Renaissance. These brilliant minds were thrust together, and instead of resting within intellectual silos, their insights were shared. What they learnt from each other challenged the way they thought about problems in their own fields – art informed science, poetry informed architecture, financial insights informed philosophy.
As part of the Havas ‘village’ in London – lovingly called HKX – we had, within our reach, our very own collection of 1,700 metaphorical Florentines. The village model is the brain child of Yannick Bollore, and it brings together Havas agencies from fields as diverse as political communications, graphic design, programmatic media and healthcare. To address our client’s challenge, we invited a diverse group of colleagues to join us for a 1-day workshop, which we dubbed The Medici Workshop.
Our colleagues’ response was superb. They attended briefing meetings with lists of questions, delving into healthcare and science with energy and enthusiasm. Attendees were from Havas People, Havas Helia, Socialyse, Sciterion, Mobext and an independent tech expert we’d worked with many times before. With all of them ready and raring to go, we set about engineering the magic moment.
The trick was to get the participants to bring their expertise, but approach the problem in an agency-agnostic way. To do this, we first removed the brief completely, and instead asked them to break the ice by sharing an object, and how it helped them ‘comply’ with good habits in their everyday life. By shifting the focus from professional to personal, we encouraged insights from every aspect of participants’ lives, before delving into their agencies’ case studies and key learnings.
What we discovered, at the end of the day, was that everyone brings a unique perspective, informed by their experience at work and in life. From showing how we could leverage the employer/employee relationship to sharing anecdotes about trying to quit smoking, each participant took the brief we’d given them and gave it a personal spin.
Near the end of the day, one of the attendees was telling us over coffee about his experience at the Burning Man festival over the summer. “No one uses money there,” he said. “Everything is a gift. You can chose to return the favour, or pay it forward, but you’ve got to be ready to come prepared and share what you’ve got.”
The experience that our Florentine attendees brought to the table was a gift. And we’re looking forward to reciprocating in kind, in the future.