What was old is new again.

Remember Digger?

A couple of years ago the pharmaceutical giant Novartis launched a marketing campaign for their drug Lamisil. Lamisil was the tradename for an oral antifungal medication. The primary use of the drug was to treat toenail fungus.

As a prescription medicine, the idea of the marketing was to convince consumers to ask their doctor for a scrip for Lamisil. The biggest hurdle in doing that was to get people aware of the existence of toenail fungus. I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a great deal of time critically examining my toenails for signs of health.

So the advertising brainiacs in charge of the campaign decided on a tried and true solution: they created an animated personification of the disease to explain what was so terrible about having toenail fungus. Enter Digger. A commercial from the original ad campaign is shown below.



As the animated avatar for a fungal infection, Digger walks the fine line between being cute and annoying at the same time. Sort of like the in-law with the store of great jokes, who stays three days too long on a visit. Or the bedraggled looking street cat that lets you pet it and purrs, then turns and claws the crap out of your hand and wrist.

Lamisil lost patent protection in 2007, at which time generic competition came onto the prescription market. That was about the time the TV commercials stopped running. With generic competition and the accompanying loss of market share, heavy advertising probably reduced the profitability of the Lamisil brand.

After all, if you’re spending big bucks on TV ads to make people aware of the existence of the disease your drug treats, and then people end up buying the generic because of lower copays, all your ads are doing is driving sales for your competitor. So you drop the ads, lower your price, and you can still make more money on lower sales volume. Television advertising is expensive. It costs vastly more to market a drug than it does to manufacture and distribute it.

Fast forward to today. Novartis has launched a topical version of Lamisil as an over the counter medication. The most common reason folks pop into Walgreens to pick up antifungals is to treat athlete’s foot. Now, profit margins on over the counter meds can be pretty good, but you have to support the brand with marketing.

So Digger has been resurrected, this time as athlete’s foot fungus. You can see the new ad here.

So not only are pharmaceuticals resurrected in new formulations, but now the drug mascots are being reused as well. Maybe there really is nothing new under the sun.