Winner
Tabatha: The Think.Act.Breathe Asthma Chatbot
Summary of work
Nearly one in two people with asthma experience symptoms despite treatment, impacting their daily life and putting them at risk of asthma attacks. Worryingly, they often take no action. In response, Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) created Think.Act.Breathe (TAB) in 2014 to encourage people with asthma to: re-THINK their expectations, ACT to reduce the risk of asthma attacks and BREATHE better by speaking with a doctor. Results showed campaign engagement was high but couldn’t measure whether people were sufficiently informed or motivated enough to act. This was addressed in 2017 with ‘Tabatha’, the first Facebook-based Artificial Intelligence chatbot deployed to encourage people to seek healthcare professional advice. Chatbots can mimic real conversations and reach audiences where they already dwell online. Crucially, they can measure intent to take action – in this case, intent to speak with a doctor about their asthma symptoms. Through strong focus on use of innovation and strategy from chatbot development and its launch via video-led social content, to the Facebook and Instagram-based paid strategy, Tabatha surpassed every success metric set.
Judges’ comments
An innovative, simple and effective entry that gets around many issues in the industry and manages to do something truly different in an increasingly challenging environment. It was a great demonstration of how you can take a complex thing like AI and embed it into a simple tool that addresses what people actually need - it was truly designed around patient needs, rather than what the pharma company could do. It was a bold initiative for a pharma company, and the data captured and measured was excellent. The judges liked that it was built on previous programmes and was therefore both an innovation and evolution as well as being sustainable.
