We hoped, tentatively, at the start off of 2021 that this year would mark the endgame for COVID: New vaccines and medication have been set to help us lessen the danger of dying and illness severity, and we envisioned to go from a pandemic state to an endemic one particular.

For sales reps and entrepreneurs, the hope was that the disruption COVID wrought would begin to end and some type of return to normal could begin in earnest. What we had alternatively were being variants: alpha, delta and then, just in time for Xmas, omicron, which nixed that concept.

No surprises, then, that searching back again around the past calendar year of pharma advertising coverage COVID, vaccines and career cuts dominated, but there was also area for more “normal” tales.

The biggest story of the calendar year for Fierce Pharma Marketing, and 1 of the most go through tales we have ever had, was the within scoop from the Broad Institute on how Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine model name, Comirnaty, arrived to be.

Unusually enough, this name under no circumstances attained the heights of Pfizer’s other important blockbusters like Lipitor and Viagra, and it was, in truth, Pfizer’s individual model that observed the most visibility.

Our 2nd most read through story is, at the time again, Pfizer-primarily based, and all over again, it is about branding, but not about vaccines: Pfizer chose to redo its logo, basing the layout on two-tone blue double helix spiral, changing the now out-of-date staid blue oval pill track record.

Switching gears, our third most popular story of 2021 comes from a Television set ad that commences “Welcome to my vagina,” undoubtedly the winner of the boldest opening to any pharma promo this calendar year (or maybe any 12 months).

The advertisement was the newest Phexxi beginning command business, which opens with that line spoken by award-profitable “Schitt’s Creek” actor Annie Murphy. Evofem, which makes the drug, claimed: “We consider of the manufacturer as authentic and reliable and sassy and edgy, but also empowering. We thought about a lot of celebs, we talked to a large amount of celebrities, but to be sincere, Annie Murphy is a unicorn.”

Our fourth focuses on the diabetes market place fight amongst Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the two giants of the place, and how Lilly’s new dual action diabetes med could…