Pharma is no longer hiding. In July 2026, Novo Nordisk built a public maze along the River Thames in London — staffed with actors, packed with obesity facts, and featuring a video from former soap actress Natalie Cassidy. It mentioned Wegovy exactly zero times, because UK law bans direct drug advertising. Yet it existed at all, in public, as a deliberate brand play.
According to Fierce Pharma editors Ben Adams and Zoey Becker, speaking on The Top Line podcast, that maze is not an isolated stunt. It’s the clearest signal yet of an industry-wide shift: pharmaceutical companies are stepping out of the shadows and into the public spotlight in ways they’ve historically avoided. Creators, influencers, physical installations, awards shows — the marketing playbook of consumer brands is now the playbook of pharma.
The HIV PrEP market: from stigma to insider humor
The PrEP market is still young. These drugs have only been around for about 15 years, and Gilead didn’t start marketing Truvada until 2016 — meaning the entire field of PrEP advertising is barely a decade old. That youth is precisely why the marketing is evolving so fast.
Becker’s reporting on HIV campaigns reveals a market pivoting hard toward long-acting injectables, and with it, a strategic shift from facts-and-figures education to identity-driven storytelling. The two flagship campaigns illustrate the spectrum:
CampaignCompanyFormatCore messageNotable element”Do It For Future You”ViiV HealthcareMulti-channel umbrellaLong-acting injectables remove daily-pill worryFeatures diverse demographics to counter the misconception that PrEP is only for gay or trans men”Animal Attraction”Gilead Sciences (Canada)Video ad, bronze at Cannes Lions 2026″It’s wild out there” — a wink to gay subcultureDepicts a bear holding an otter; uses AI for the imagery
The Gilead campaign is the sharper signal. The bear-and-otter imagery is insider code — terms for different body types within gay male culture. Becker noted she had to research the terminology herself, which underscores how niche the cultural fluency now required has become. The ad’s creators put it bluntly.
““Our work now has to go beyond including the community and more to really understanding the community,”” the agency collective behind the ad told Becker.
The AI-generated visuals solved a practical problem — you can’t easily film a bear and an otter together — but the concept itself came from human cultural knowledge. That division of labor, AI handling execution while humans handle meaning, recurs throughout the industry’s current moment.
AI in agencies: efficiency tool, not creative replacement
Adams’s agency interviews across Havas, So Health, Real Chemistry, and Ogilvy Health converge on a consistent position.
““Every agency I’ve spoken to acknowledges AI is becoming fundamental to their workflows, but they do see AI as a tool to help rather than one that will destroy,”” Adams said.
The most concrete example is Ogilvy Health’s proprietary “RIA” tool. RIA ingests every claim the FDA’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion has ever made, then flags promotional materials for potential violations before they’re released. It’s a direct response to OPDP’s ramped-up scrutiny of direct-to-consumer ads — and a competitive differentiator. An agency that can guarantee faster compliance turnaround has an edge.
Havas’s “Stop the Forced Feed” campaign for the CyberSmile Foundation shows how algorithmic thinking translates into physical activism. Havas research found that young boys are fed masculinist and anti-feminist content within minutes of going online — not by choice but by algorithmic push. The agency made this digital force-feeding literal: black-painted food labeled “racist white bread” and “misogynistic eggs” was sent to UK politicians and retailers.
The unresolved tension: agencies insist AI won’t replace human creativity, but the tools being built — compliance flagging, efficiency gains — are precisely the kind that reduce headcount over time. The next 12 months will show whether the “AI as tool” framing survives as agencies scale these proprietary systems.
Physical-world stunts and the post-COVID visibility push
Novo Nordisk’s Thames maze was pure disease awareness — no mention of Wegovy, no product claim. Visitors had to remember obesity facts to open doors, a mild escape-room mechanic that turned education into a game. The context: Novo is in an active competitive battle with Eli Lilly, whose rival obesity medications have been outpacing Novo in the market. The maze is a response to that pressure — a way to own the obesity conversation without being able to name the product.
““There are so many regulatory barriers to promotion in the UK that it’s all too easy to hide behind a bland PR that has been looked over by a team of lawyers. Novo took a chance and connected a pharma company directly with the patient,”” Adams said.
That willingness to take public-facing risks is new. Pharma’s reputation spiked during COVID and has settled since, but the visibility impulse has persisted. Adams framed it as a purposeful tactic, not a passing fad.
The MrBeast experiment: creator-led storytelling at scale
Amgen’s collaboration with MrBeast is the most striking example of pharma chasing creator-led reach. MrBeast’s video “I Helped 100 Kids Fight Cancer” featured LeBron James, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Amgen’s EVP of R&D, AI, and Data, Jay Bradner. It’s part of a broader pediatric cancer research collaboration between Amgen, MrBeast’s Beast Philanthropy, and other research foundations.
The strategic logic, as Amgen’s head of corporate affairs Susie Tapponi explained to Becker, is simple: the company needs to be where the audience already is, not where it hopes the audience will go.
““It’s like creator-led storytelling but on a whole new scale, and especially really helping to instill this message in a younger generation who might not do their own go to Amgen’s websites themselves, but they will see it on this MrBeast video,”” Becker said.
Other platform moves reinforce the pattern:
Biomarin launched “Why Do I Feel This Way,” a three-part video podcast targeting adolescents with PKU, a rare metabolic disease. Clips on TikTok have racked up millions of views.
Snapchat rolled out an advertising tool that lets pharma add call-to-action buttons and disclaimers — a small but notable step for a platform with a young user base and ephemeral content format that has never been a traditional pharma marketing channel.
The through-line: pharma is following audience attention wherever it goes, even when platform norms clash with compliance requirements. Snapchat’s tool is explicitly designed to bridge that gap by attaching safety and prescribing information directly to ads.
Rare disease marketing: building the infrastructure that doesn’t exist
Two campaigns show how rare disease marketing is moving beyond awareness days into sustained community-building.
Amelix launched “PBH,” an awareness website for post-bariatric hypoglycemia, a rare condition that can occur after weight-loss surgery. The site fills a gap — there was no central resource hub for the condition. Because PBH is acquired rather than congenital, awareness and education are the primary market-building tools.
CG Life is organizing a rare disease film festival in San Diego in 2026, part of its “24-364” storytelling platform — a name referencing the 364 days beyond Rare Disease Day. The festival will screen documentaries and give awards, turning patient experiences into cultural production.
Both campaigns share a premise: rare disease patients are underserved not just medically but informationally, and pharma’s role is to build the infrastructure of community and knowledge that the healthcare system hasn’t.
Cannes Lions 2026: pharma’s return to the winner’s circle
For years after the pandemic, pharma product campaigns lost top honors at Cannes Lions to med-tech, digital, and audio firms. In 2026, that changed:
AwardCompanyCampaignGrand Prix (top prize)Novartis”Relax Your Tight End” — Super Bowl prostate cancer screening adGoldViatris (with Ogilvy Health)”Make Love Last”SilverNovartisAdditional element of “Relax” campaignBronzeGilead Sciences Canada”Animal Attraction”
Adams’s analysis: the post-pandemic drought spurred healthcare agencies to double down on creativity specifically for these awards. The Novartis win combined the current pharma playbook — sports, celebrity, real patients, humor mixed with seriousness — into a single Super Bowl spot. The awards matter commercially: they signal to clients and competitors that pharma agencies can compete with the broader creative industry, not just within their own vertical.
Fierce Pharma Week 2026
The industry convenes in Philadelphia starting September 14. Becker will moderate the HCP engagement opening keynote featuring two clinicians — Dr. Neil D. Parrick, a gastroenterologist known as “the gut doctor” on his own podcast, and Philip Jocelyn, associate chief advanced clinical provider at New York Presbyterian Hospital. The session’s premise: what healthcare providers want pharma marketers to know, straight from the source.
The week also includes the Fierce Pharma Marketing Awards — the industry’s own Oscars, as Becker put it.
Three threads connect all of this. Regulatory constraint is driving creativity, not suppressing it: the UK drug-ad ban produced the Thames maze, OPDP scrutiny produced Ogilvy’s RIA tool, and Snapchat’s compliance features are designed to make a historically risky platform viable for pharmaceutical advertisers. Pharma is borrowing the playbooks of consumer brands — MrBeast collaborations, Cannes Grand Prix ambitions, culturally insider HIV ads — while maintaining a compliance layer that consumer brands don’t need. And AI is being adopted where it reduces risk, not where it creates value: the RIA tool is the clearest example, while Gilead’s bear-and-otter ad used AI for imagery but relied on human cultural knowledge for the concept.
For investors and operators watching pharma’s commercial side, the signals are clear. Marketing budgets are flowing toward creator partnerships and physical experiences. Agency tooling is becoming a competitive differentiator. And the Novo Nordisk–Eli Lilly rivalry is now being fought in public spaces as much as in clinical trials — a maze on the Thames is a market-share play. The next 12 months will determine whether the “AI as tool” framing survives as agencies scale their proprietary systems, and whether public-facing campaigns translate into durable brand equity or remain expensive experiments.