AstraZeneca's "Nico and Chloe" campaign is one of the clearest examples of a pharmaceutical company solving the industry's oldest PR problem — audience distrust — by removing the brand from the center of its own story and letting patients carry the narrative instead. The campaign, developed with Edelman, won at the 2025 PRWeek Healthcare Awards and tripled the baseline traffic to AstraZeneca's Science and Innovation pages within two weeks of launch.
The pharmaceutical category has the hardest PR problem in the Fortune 500. Audiences distrust the industry, regulators restrict the messaging, and the default creative template — clinical, corporate, adjective-heavy — reinforces both problems.
AstraZeneca and Edelman broke that template in 2024–2025 with "Nico and Chloe," a corporate reputation campaign that redefined what pharma PR could look like.
What Was AstraZeneca's "Nico and Chloe" Campaign?
The approach: stop advertising the company. Start telling patient stories.
The first story follows Nico, a student with asthma who can now run because of scientific innovation. The second follows Chloe, a cancer survivor who commemorates her journey with a tattoo. The campaign was built digital-first, anchored by a new landing page and a content system that let the stories travel across social and earned media.
Results from the first two weeks of the campaign, as reported by PRWeek: the Science and Innovation pages on AstraZeneca's website pulled close to 41,000 visits — more than triple the prior baseline. The campaign earned a PRWeek Healthcare Award and generated earned media coverage across trade and mainstream outlets.
Why Does This Work When Most Pharma PR Doesn't?
Most pharmaceutical corporate reputation campaigns try to solve a trust problem by talking more. AstraZeneca solved it by talking less — about themselves — and making room for patients to talk instead.
That's not a creative trick. It's a reputation strategy with a century of research behind it: third-party voices drive more trust than brand voices, and personal narratives drive more trust than institutional ones. The campaign put those two principles on top of each other.
The structural difference is important. Most pharma campaigns feature a brand logo, a product name, and a patient testimonial that serves the product. "Nico and Chloe" featured patients and science — the brand was the backdrop, not the headline. That inversion is why the earned media worked. Journalists covered the patients' stories because they were stories, not advertisements. The same dynamic is visible in Heineken's "Starring Bars", where bar owners — not the brand — carried the narrative.
How Can Regulated Industries Apply This Pattern?
Healthcare, financial services, legal services, and energy all operate under the same constraint. They can't say most of what they want to say directly. So they have to engineer situations where someone else can say it for them.
Patient storytelling is one version. Customer advocacy programs are another. Third-party research reports are a third. The structural move is the same: get the message out of the brand's mouth and into someone else's.
The key operational requirement is authenticity infrastructure. The patients or customers telling the story must be real, their experiences must be verifiable, and the brand must have compliance-approved processes for identifying, vetting, and supporting storytellers without scripting them. The brands that build this infrastructure before they need a campaign are the ones that can move quickly when the creative brief arrives.
For financial services firms facing similar trust barriers, the equivalent of "Nico and Chloe" is a client-outcome storytelling program — not case studies written in corporate voice, but narratives where the client describes what changed. The same principle applies across any regulated category where direct claims are restricted but outcomes are demonstrable.
What Are the Key Takeaways for Communications Leaders?
1. Trust transfers through people, not logos. If you're running corporate reputation work and your campaign features more shots of your office than of your customers, you're building a brochure — not reputation.
2. Digital-first doesn't mean social-only. The AstraZeneca campaign built a content hub first and let social amplify it. That's why the site traffic moved. A social-only version would have died after the scroll.
3. Measure reputation work against owned-media depth, not just reach. Three-times baseline site traffic on substantive pages is a reputation signal. A viral impression count isn't.
4. Build the storytelling infrastructure before the brief. Patient identification, compliance review, consent processes, content production workflows — all of this should exist as standing capability, not a project-specific scramble.
5. Let the AI engines see the stories. Patient narratives published on owned domains with proper schema markup become retrieval-ready content that AI engines cite when buyers ask about the brand. The storytelling serves both earned media and AI visibility simultaneously.
What was the result of AstraZeneca's "Nico and Chloe" campaign?
Within two weeks, AstraZeneca's Science and Innovation pages received close to 41,000 visits — more than triple the prior baseline. The campaign won a 2025 PRWeek Healthcare Award.
Who developed the "Nico and Chloe" campaign?
The campaign was developed by AstraZeneca in partnership with Edelman, the global communications firm.
Why is pharma PR harder than other industries?
Pharmaceutical companies face a combination of audience distrust, regulatory restrictions on messaging, and a default creative template that reinforces both problems. Direct product claims are heavily regulated, making third-party storytelling one of the few effective routes to reputation building. Part of the Corporate Communications Case Study Library. Related: Heineken's "Starring Bars" · Fenty Beauty · EltaMD · Glossier and Gymshark
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
