“I’m Pharmacy” campaign wins educational advertising award

Campaign highlights diverse pharmacy and pharmaceutical science research working toward common goal

Outdoor advertisements for the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy have won gold in the Annual Educational Advertising Awards, the largest and most respected educational advertising awards in the US. The campaign – “I’m Pharmacy” – was designed by the agency Scott Thornley and Company Inc. in partnership with the  Communications Office after extensive consultation with faculty, students and staff.

“The ‘I’m Pharmacy’ campaign allows everyone at the Faculty to take pride in the fact that we’re all contributing to something greater than what we’re doing as individuals,” says Zubin Austin, Professor and Academic Director, Centre for Practice Excellence, who was part of the core team that consulted on the campaign.

The advertisements, which were featured in transit shelters throughout Toronto, each highlighted one of several researchers representing pharmacy or pharmaceutical science research and education – from drug discovery to clinical care to health system evaluation.

Austin, whose research program focuses on professional identity in health care, says that highlighting how the LDFP embraces different fields of research under one professional identify mirrors the importance of professional identity in individuals.

“As human beings and professionals, we fire on all pistons when we are allowed to use everything about ourselves, not when we are unnecessarily narrow in how we are expected to look, sound or act,” says Austin. “In the same way, pharmacy as a faculty and a profession is at its best when it is bigger and broader rather than a narrow view of what we think pharmacy is.”

The campaign challenged the narrow public perception of pharmacy by demonstrating how everyone in the faculty, despite their difference in expertise, is working together toward a common goal – moving science and health forward.

“The genius of ‘I’m Pharmacy’ is that it relished, rather than tried to suppress, these kinds of expansive differences,” says Austin. “And our strength is that all of us fit and have something to contribute, and the way we contribute is by bringing the best of ourselves.”