Medtronic Diabetes Group

Medtronic logo over an active senior in a pool

open quotation marks close quotation marks Merryman Communications showed wonderful creativity in how to maximize important study results. Also, their team supported us beyond just media relations and helped us prepare for internal communication as well as engage with our Diabetes Online Community of bloggers. Their ability to orchestrate a multi-channel campaign to reach multiple audiences was top notch. It was a pleasure to work with the talented team at Merryman Communications, who not only did great work for us, but we had fun doing it, too.

Pamela Reese
Director | Global Communications & Corporate Marketing
Medtronic Diabetes Group

Merryman Communications worked closely with the internal PR team to develop and manage communications and media relations around the publication of major clinical trial results. Medtronic's global OpT2mise study evaluated the comparative effectiveness of insulin pumps vs. daily insulin injections for people with Type 2 diabetes.

  • The positive six-month trial results were published in The Lancet, and our goal was to spread the news that insulin pumps proved to be more effective in diabetes management, but also to educate media that 20 million people around the world with type 2 diabetes require insulin to survive.

The online publication occurred immediately before a July 4 holiday weekend.

Resulting coverage earned more than

160 million
impressions globally (based on unique visitors/week)

126 million
impressions in the U.S.

HealthDay, WebMD, U.S. News and World Report, Yahoo! Health, Medscape, and Endocrine Today are representative of the outlets that covered the news

Infographic

Then, six months later the one-year OpT2mise study results were published in Diabetes, Obesity & Metabolism, presenting another opportunity to promote the benefits of insulin pump therapy for people with T2. This time we recommended low-cost vehicles where we controlled the content and are guaranteed distribution.

  • We developed an infographic to highlight the OpT2mise data.
  • We also did a mat release that told the story of a Medtronic MiniMed Ambassador that also leveraged the publication of 12-month OpT2mise results as timely news hook.

Distribution of the infographic resulted in more than

450
placements and

10 million
visitors

The mat release achieved almost

950
placements and nearly

20 million
visitors

Key Success Factors:

Our ability to put the importance of the study and its findings into context for both reporters and consumers was key:

  • The OpT2mise study was the largest global study to date to evaluate the comparative efficacy of insulin pump therapy versus multiple daily insulin injections in people with type 2 diabetes, and insulin pumps provided superior outcomes.
  • Also, we emphasized the not-well-understood fact that so many people with type 2 diabetes require insulin to survive.

Lastly, we provided a one-two punch. We leveraged the newsworthiness of the initial six-month results. Then we extended the campaign when the 12-month results were published by translating the science into visuals and stories that consumers could easily understand.