With the pharmaceutical landscape now saturated with scientific animation, is it still possible for animation to make a pharma branding campaign stand out?

Over the last few decades, medical animation has become increasingly important to the pharma, biotech and medical device industries as a means of quickly delivering key information. Whether it’s used to educate sales personnel, health care providers or patients (or all three), it has become the preferred means of initial communication. Additionally, animation as a medium has the potential to embed its message deep in the viewer’s consciousness.

Pharma Branding That Stands Out

As in any crowded and growing market, there are providers for all budgetary niches creating animations that range from inexpensive and mundane to beautiful and extravagantly priced. Luckily, the trend has been for the popularization of inexpensive and mundane imagery. Most of the time, this budget-conscious animation does a satisfactory job of communicating the science. It is watched once, and then the viewer moves on. Why is that a good thing? Because it means there is still room for new pharma brands to stand out, of course!

High End Animations Enhance Brands Without the Massive Agencies

But procuring stand-out animation is expensive, sometimes prohibitively so, right? That’s mostly true, but with an important and growing group of exceptions. In recent years, small and nimble animation companies that specialize in ultra-high-end animation have sprung up. They don’t have the inflated infrastructure that comes from years of producing animations with quarter-million dollar budgets. Today’s studios employ cutting-edge organizational tactics such as virtual offices, cloud storage and delivery, and effectively unlimited cloud-based supercomputing.

Quality

These companies have MD/Ph.D-level medical experts and Masters-level medical animators who know the industry, know the science, and are masters of the art form. While they may not offer the cut-rates comparable to outsourcing overseas, their flexibility allows them to offer prices significantly lower than top-tier competitors and still serve up a production value, professionalism, design standard and scientific knowledge base on par with their higher-priced counterparts.

The net result is that the decision to use animation in a pharma branding strategy can still make a campaign stand out in a big way.