Elizabeth Rooney
Managing Director, ECD
EVERSANA INTOUCH
Breaking Barriers in HIV and Women’s Health
Last year, Elizabeth Rooney led the EVERSANA INTOUCH agency team to produce one of the most disruptive social media campaigns ever, breaking barriers and pushing to eliminate health inequities in the HIV space. Socioeconomic inequality, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and stigma have caused higher HIV rates in many communities—and these individuals are often overlooked and underrepresented in clinical trials as well.
The campaign produced for Gilead addressed this issue head on, specifically featuring and reaching groups who are underrepresented in PrEP/HIV prevention trials, yet disproportionately affected by this ongoing epidemic. The photography is stunning, featuring people who accurately represent the communities at risk for potential HIV infection. The images celebrate self-expression and sex positivity so that people can see themselves in the work. It even broke barriers in how it reached patients: The creative ran on dating apps including Grindr, Scruff, Jack’d, and Sniffies. A historic pharma first!
The campaign is already raising the trial inclusion of cisgender men, transgender women, transgender men, gender non-binary individuals, and all who have sex with partners assigned male at birth, of any race. These results are particularly notable as, per the CDC, PrEP is an important strategy to help end the HIV epidemic. In 2020, only 9% of Black/African Americans who would have benefited from PrEP were on PrEP, as were only 16% of Hispanic/Latinos.
Elizabeth is also leading an agency team advocating for progress in women’s health. Her most recent work in this space is an eye-opening birth control campaign for Nextstellis. For the past 60 years, there has been just one kind of estrogen in birth control pills but Nextstellis contains a different type of estrogen that is sourced from plants.
The TV spot is like no other birth control ad: it starts in a dystopia, where women lack choice, and then evolves to show how the world changes for the better when a woman can choose the type of estrogen she wants in her birth control pill. The spot is fiercely pro-woman, featuring the cutting-edge vision of Lorena Medina Diaz, aimed to leave women with a more-than-ever needed feeling of choice, strength, and female empowerment.
