Physician’s Weekly
Physician’s Weekly needed to attract advertisers for its large-format broadsheet displayed in “doctors-only” areas inside 1,600+ hospitals. A non-conventional media, it competes with hundreds of medical journals for the attention of 200,000+ hospital-based and attending doctors. Graphicus was asked to develop a means to promote this unique weekly publication to pharmaceutical companies – the primary advertising group.
The agency created a persona for P.W., which illustrates its cardinal advantage over medical journals: its directness, that is, it does not require the magazine or direct-mail vehicle to carry the advertisement to the “point of care,” where purchase decisions are made. In this, it suggests that traveling billboard – the sandwichman, or -woman. In a series of seven two-sided leaflets and three full-page trade ads, P.W. is represented as a sandwich-person, in conversation with doctors, in hospital locations, off-limits to salespersons. Graphicus chose to treat the context for each tableau as loosely handled black-line illustrations – to obviate the difficulty and cost of staging and photographing actual settings and also to draw attention to the only color on the page: Physician’s Weekly.
