After learning that sports fans are up to two times more likely to experience a heart event than other people, Bayer targeted the demographic with content encouraging them to seek a heart health assessment.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
Nevertheless, heart health simply isn't top of mind for most people. Indeed, the need to spend time, money, and effort visiting a doctor to assess heart-disease risk can be a barrier to taking early action.
In short, getting people to take an assessment of their heart-disease risk factors is a daunting task.
Aspirin's objectives were to:
Bayer Aspirin is a substantial weapon in the battle against heart disease, the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S. for men and women. It can be a lifesaver for anyone with certain specific heart issues and is recommended by doctors for some of their patients as part of a daily regimen for helping to reduce a second heart attack.
Traditionally, Bayer Aspirin has focused heavily on reaching its core audience during American Heart Month in February, encouraging people to assess their cardiovascular risk factors. In 2022 and 2023 however, it became apparent that consumers were becoming more reluctant to do so, contributing to the category-wide decline in sales.
Bayer Aspirin needed to find a new way to connect with U.S. consumers when it came to heart health.
Sports fans are up to two times more likely to experience a heart event when they are watching their home team play. This statistic, combined with other health, behavior, and lifestyle data, helped identify a new audience likely to be at a higher risk of cardiovascular disease: sports fans.
Bayer's data point became the core of its campaign, undertaken with agency partner EssenceMediacom, and gave the brand a way to deliver a potentially lifesaving message, not by using fear, but by tapping into what people are most passionate about — their favorite sports teams.
Aspirin set out to support fans who put their whole being into their fandom as the Official Sponsor of Fans' Hearts.
Bayer's strategy comprised three key objectives:
Bayer launched its effort during the year's biggest sports event, with TV ads during the Super Bowl in both teams' home markets, Philadelphia and Kansas City.
The brand then partnered with NBC Regional Sports and Bally Sports to reach basketball, hockey, and baseball fans. Live on-air heart monitoring segments called Heart of the Game, followed NBC regional sports broadcasters and tracked their heart rate during some of the season's most stressful games.
Bayer also placed monitors on four NBA fans, who sat down post-game with a professional sports medicine doctor to analyze how the stress of the game had affected their heart. Cutdowns also ran across NBC and social media.
Additionally, the brand partnered with baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, surrounding their first game of the season via digital OOH and print. Digital advertising continued throughout the year.
Finally, Bayer worked with GeniusMedia to launch a "sports crawler" on X during key hockey and basketball games, intercepting real-time conversations about heart-pounding moments.
True to Bayer's goal of getting fans to engage with and consider a challenging subject, the brand's hero films sparked more feelings of empowerment than 88 percent of OTC ads.
In just eight weeks, Bayer saw:
Even more importantly, Bayer drove action among the people who most needed it, as 84 percent of people who completed the risk factor assessment were found to have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
Finally, the highly engaging approach delivered a significant business impact: Bayer Aspirin sales grew 6 percent and the brand's market share increased by 1.4 percent. The effort's focus on key local markets also paid off with a 240 percent growth in share.
