A Llama Walks Into an Office, and Nobody Knows Quite What to Make of It

The pharmaceutical industry, which has spent decades perfecting the art of showing middle-aged couples holding hands on beaches while a narrator reads aloud from the fine print, has apparently decided that what the genre really needed was a llama in a conference room.

AstraZeneca's Breztri inhaler, previously marketed only to patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is now approved for asthma maintenance — and the company has marked the occasion with a campaign featuring llamas, goats and an oryx behaving as office workers, all of them generated entirely by artificial intelligence.

The llama concept, according to Katie Pansegrau, a senior director of marketing at AstraZeneca, derives from the acronym LAMA, which stands for Long Acting Muscarinic Antagonist, one of the drug's three active components. "What a fun play on words," Ms. Pansegrau recalled thinking. (One imagines the meeting where this observation was first voiced.)

The campaign was created by Edelman, which is handling Breztri creative work for the first time. Brian Wood, a senior vice president and group creative director at the agency, said the goal was to avoid making "just another pharma campaign" — or, as he put it with admirable directness, "more slop that's filling everyone's feeds these days."

Mr. Wood said artificial intelligence, rather than traditional computer-generated imagery, allowed the production team to experiment with multiple approaches to each scene, essentially conducting multiple takes with animals that do not, strictly speaking, exist.

The shift in target audience — asthma patients skew younger than those with C.O.P.D. — accounts for both the tonal departure and the heavier presence on social media and connected television. Breztri's previous campaigns had favored cruise ships and recreational vehicles, settings that now seem almost quaint by comparison.

Media buying is being handled by HealixGlobal, part of Omnicom.

Whether a llama in a workplace will prove more memorable than a couple walking on a beach remains to be seen. But at least no actual llamas were required to find out.

Original story published in MediaPost: "'Wonderfully Weird': Breztri's AI-Created Llama Ads Break Pharma Tropes"