Sanofi: Not Today, Flu

A flu campaign that dropped the fear — because the audience’s brains literally couldn’t take any more of it.

Weber Shandwick — SVP, Strategy

The problem behind the problem

Fear stopped working

Americans underestimate the flu — the heart attacks, pneumonia, and strokes that ride in with it — and vaccination slides down the priority list every fall. The category’s standard answer is to scare people into the pharmacy. But COVID changed the receiving end: years of relentless health messaging produced genuine information overload, a documented cognitive state in which the brain loses the capacity to process one more alarm.

The insight

Our brains can’t handle any more fear-based prevention messages — literally.

The audience wasn’t ignoring flu warnings out of carelessness.

The move

Unexpected beats urgent

The strategy went at flu minimizers — people who’d absorbed three years of health messaging and filed flu under “later” — and compelled the vaccination visit through the unexpected and memorable instead of one more warning. That meant Jason Alexander fronting an integrated campaign built from scratch: naming and branding with a full style guide, site experience, organic and paid social, video, and influencer partnerships.

Solid orange background with a small white text at the bottom right corner.
A woman on the left side giving a thumbs down and a man on the right side holding a milk carton and making a grimace, with a pink and purple themed background promoting flu prevention.
Person in a mustard-colored sweater opening a closed silver laptop on a wooden desk.
Female tennis player in a white uniform, wearing a visor and wristbands, crouching on a clay court with a tennis racket in her hand.

Receipts

What it moved

1.8B+

Earned media reach

85,627

Website clicks toward a flu shot

Fierce Pharma on the campaign →

All selected work →
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