Ogilvy Health's new creative chief Hessel reflects on pharma's pandemic opportunities

To illustrate how the pharma marketing landscape has shifted during the pandemic, Ogilvy Health’s new chief creative officer Adam Hessel brings up a phone call he had recently with his mother.

“What do you know about remdesivir?” she asked him, referring to Gilead’s COVID-19 antiviral drug. His point was that COVID has taken once-obscure drugs and pharma companies “with weird names that you’ve never heard of before” and turned them into household names.