Happy Feet collaboration makes for happy faces at Roche

Happy Feet collaboration makes for happy faces at Roche        

Roche skated on thin ice when it broke traditional marketing practices and collaborated with the Warner Brothers movie Happy Feet (ePharm5, 11/2/06) to promote its Tamiflu brand, but it paid off. The Web site, FluFacts.com, attracted more than a million unique visitors in the first 75 days after launch. Roche pursued cobranding with Happy Feet because of the appeal of the movie's penguin characters, their identification with winter and cold, and the timing of the movie's release alongside flu season, reports MedAdNews. Also, Roche was looking to target mothers, and Happy Feet director George Miller is a former doctor and he supported the Hoffmann-La Roche marketing plan, reports suite101.com. The campaign includes television, print, and Internet, along with advertising in airports and movie theaters. Tamiflu is not mentioned in any of the advertising for FluFacts.com and is referenced on the site only along with other drugs under a flu antivirals link. FluFacts.com features interactive learning tools, such as a symptoms checker, a symptoms tutorial, and a flu map for tracking the level of flu events in a certain area. Product site Tamiflu.com features some of the same interactive tools, like the flu tracker map.