JeffreyGroup today announced a partnership with Pfizer Inc. to lead a public health campaign across 14 Latin American countries.
The educational outreach will address the growing number of adults acquiring pneumococcal disease and show the effectiveness of vaccines for adults over the age of 50.
This is the first major, multi-country campaign Pfizer has awarded to the JeffreyGroup, which is an independent communications firm geared at engaging Latin audiences.
"With approximately 125,000 Latin Americans over the age of 50 dying each year from pneumococcal disease, we felt it was critical to lead an aggressive awareness campaign to help educate the public about their prevention options," said Mark Partridge, emerging markets business unit, vaccines at Pfizer, in a press release. "We're happy to say we found a match with JeffreyGroup."
He cited JeffreyGroup's expertise in Latin American regulations and its creativity.
The campaign will include a trilingual website in English, Spanish and Portuguese, social media management, testimonial videos, key opinion leader outreach, consumer events, community outreach and traditional media relations.
"One of the things we pride ourselves on is having a proprietary database of online influentials and bloggers across the U.S. and Latin America," said JeffreyGroup President Mike Valdes-Fauli. "We call that list 'webfluentials,' and we believe that's one of the reasons Pfizer selected JeffreyGroup—because of the strength of that database and the effectiveness of communicating with online audiences."
As the number of Internet users continues to grow, an online presence for any type of campaign, whether educational or brand-driven, should have a social media component, Valdes-Fauli said.
"It used to be that no one used social media, and then for a while certain campaigns merited it while others didn't," he said. "These days, most campaigns should have a social media component. To completely ignore an entire medium and platform where people are living and breathing wouldn't be the best approach."
For now, the outreach will concentrate on Latin American countries, but because Hispanics are what Valdes-Fauli calls a transient culture, there is room for U.S. outreach at a later date.
"There's such a cross-overflow of information with Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic market," he said. "(U.S). Hispanics are at least occasionally speaking to families back home, (and) they might be able to influence checking with your doctor or at least get vaccinated, which is really what we're trying to do.
"We're trying to create awareness and a call to action and influence decision-making," he added.
The estimated launch of the health campaign is late October or early November.
