Ophelia Health launched an intentionally provocative medication-assisted treatment (MAT) marketing campaign.
The tagline for the campaign is “Fu*ck Rehab.”
The New York City-based startup intends to challenge “rehab” as the default option for opioid use disorder (OUD). Ophelia Health has raised $67 million, according to Crunchbase. It solely focuses on treating OUD with MAT via telehealth.
While Ophelia’s campaign is sure to turn heads, the strategy may not have the intended impact, marketing experts say. And it may turn off possible partners in the addiction treatment space — and potential clients.
But that’s a risk Ophelia Health is willing to take to raise greater awareness of MAT for OUD.
“Honestly, those who are mad at us are probably mad because they’re not doing the right thing,” Ophelia Health Marketing Vice President Jenni Friedman told Behavioral Health Business. “Let’s have a conversation [about] it.”
Ophelia Health put up concert-style posters Friedman called “wild postings” on Jan. 2. The posters are displayed in Philadelphia and Bangor, Maine.
In Philadelphia, ads are posted along a Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) route. They are also on display in 50 other locations in the city.
The company put up billboards and announced the campaign on Jan. 9
The counterculture-styled posters and the tagline, “F*ck Rehab,” are meant to imitate an “anti-capitalist, punk look,” Friedman said.
The posters also feature an illustration of the words “Rehab” and “Relapse” making the circular outline of an emoji-like face. They also include unfavorable stats about rehab programs.
Ophelia Health partnered with the New York City-based advertising firm Giant Spoon LLC for the campaign.
Ophelia Health’s team brought the concept, including the expletive language, to the collaboration. Giant Spoon developed the aesthetic, Friedman said.
The Ophelia team also talked to patients when developing the new campaign.
“This comes from our patients,” Friedman said. “We had a few patients saying, ‘I didn’t know. I did go to rehab, and I didn’t know that I was able to ask them questions [about treatment].'”
The factual basis undergirding Ophelia’s new campaign highlights unfortunate realities about addiction treatment in the U.S. The company defines “rehab” as “all types of addiction programs” including residential treatment, outpatient and abstinence-focused programs, according to the company’s website.
Nearly all, about 90%, of people discharged from inpatient detoxification programs for OUD relapse within a year; 65% relapse within a month.
“Our 2023 advertising campaign is not only asking you to rethink everything you know about treatment for opioid addiction,” the Ophelia Health website states. “It’s also challenging you to hold traditional methods of treatment (aka rehab) accountable for killing people.”
The risk of a fatal overdose is especially high after abstinence-based treatment. Drug overdose is the leading cause of death of formerly incarcerated people.
Ophelia Health is also keen to point to the use of MAT as the key to successful recovery. A recent study found that only methadone- and buprenorphine-aided treatments were associated with reduced risks of death and serious acute care incidents when compared with other modes of treating OUD. Another finds that all-cause mortality for those with OUD that received MAT is about half of that compared to those who do not.
Ophelia Health’s audiences
Marketing in the addiction treatment space doesn’t often diverge from safe, generic campaigns. This isn’t because of a desire to play it safe. Rather it reflects a lack of sophistication and unwillingness to test marketing spending, Nick Jaworski, CEO of the behavioral health-focused marketing firm Circle Social Inc., told BHB
“I frankly admire the audacity. … It’s nice to see people willing to take a risk of sorts,” Jaworski said of his initial reaction to the campaign. “The follow-up to that is this messaging is not the risk I would take.”
Marketing efforts for MAT providers have two audiences in Jaworski’s assessment — community referral partners and the Medicaid population.
The former are organizations that value collaboration in addressing a common challenge. The latter is indifferent to the “politics” of the addiction treatment space and differentiation in treatment, Jaworski added.
“It’s actually going to be antagonistic towards the referral partners, in my opinion,” Jaworski said. “I think it’s not the right messaging that’s going to be helpful for them or overly supportive of the field and their objectives in general.”
Many providers do not look beyond the tracking metrics for digital ads through the sales funnel.
Jaworski contends that most people seeking MAT have not had a bad experience with rehab. Rather, they are seeking that medication as part of a treatment plan.
“Any clinician that works in an abstinence-based treatment center, and anyone that works in the industry outside of MAT, it’s going to piss people off,” Daniel Gemp, president of Dreamscape Marketing, told BHB. “Marketing is part art, part science. … I was like, ‘You put the [art] in there, I get what you’re doing. But you didn’t put the science part in there.'”
The aggression in the marketing makes “rehab” the enemy in the narrative of the Ophelia Health marketing campaign, Gemp said. Rather, the true enemy of addiction treatment is addiction.
Even in similar campaign language that use profanities, such as with certain cancer awareness efforts, make the disease the enemy in the narrative, not the providers that treat it.
“F*ck Rehab isn’t necessarily the problem — rather, the expectation that the deliverable of rehab includes guaranteed sobriety as a product versus a process,” Gemp said. “Is an orthopedic surgeon successful if you don’t do the therapy or follow-up work needed for a full and robust recovery? F*ck Knee Surgery? … Does an oncologist cure cancer? F*ck Cancer Treatment? I’m more solidly on the side of ‘F*ck Cancer,’ ‘F*ck Addiction.'”
The impact
Ophelia Health hopes to be an impetus to greater adoption of MAT as a first-line treatment and challenge rehab as the default option for care. The company commissioned a media audit of OUD coverage. It found that more than 90% of media presents OUD in terms of overdoses and addiction with the small remainder addressing OUD in terms of treatment.
The greatest risk of the campaign, Friedman said, is that it makes “some people angry and starts a conversation.” However, no marketing effort controls how messages are received by an audience.
“Out of an abundance of caution, I’d be a little concerned that potential patients would take the message literally and choose not to pursue treatment of any kind,” Gemp said. “If I’m doing heroin and I see a poster that says, ‘F*ck Rehab,’ and I agree with it, I’m not going to call Ophelia. I’m just not going to get any treatment.”
Jaworski points out that provocative language has accomplished one objective of marketing, getting attention.
But he called that the first step of marketing. The next step is formulating messages that create a brand, or reputation, for the business that helps it grow. The Ophelia Health campaign doesn’t get to that point, Jaworski said.
“Criticizing others in the space is not going to be looked on favorably by anyone,” Jaworski said. “Is there a valid conversation to have focused on outcomes and improvement and making sure that we’re all doing a better job? Yes, that’s a super important conversation that we should all be having.
“But we shouldn’t be doing it by tearing down other people in the space; we should be doing it by working together and building people up.”
Friedman says she expects the campaign to have been worth it. The physical media has a four-week flight. Much of the work of getting the campaign going was done in-house, she said.
She also downplayed the likelihood that people would be turned off from getting any treatment for OUD if they see “F*ck Rehab” ads and take them literally.
“I don’t know what … would be a risk that we’re not prepared to face, that wouldn’t be expected,” Friedman said.
Companies featured in this article:
Circle Social Inc., Dreamscape Marketing, Ophelia, Ophelia Health
