No­vo Nordisk trades Ry­bel­sus' an­i­mat­ed Covid-launch ads for ‘more re­lat­able’ live ac­tion cam­paign

When No­vo Nordisk nabbed a nod for an oral type 2 semaglu­tide called Ry­bel­sus, it was Sep­tem­ber 2019. When the world changed just a few months lat­er, in­stead of shoot­ing TV ads, No­vo Nordisk was scram­bling to fig­ure out how to cre­ate a main­stream di­rect-to-con­sumer cam­paign re­mote­ly.

With pan­dem­ic re­stric­tions stymy­ing orig­i­nal plans to use ac­tors on set, No­vo and its agency piv­ot­ed and in­stead cre­at­ed an an­i­mat­ed cam­paign. The bright cheer­ful graph­ics in the launch TV ad were dri­ven by an up­beat rock ver­sion of the nurs­ery rhyme “You Are My Sun­shine” sound­track and de­buted in Sep­tem­ber 2020 to pos­i­tive re­views.

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