TL;DR

Novartis put eight NFL tight ends in hammocks and told every man watching the Super Bowl to “relax your tight end.” Which is funny, and also a compelling message because the first prostate cancer screening is a blood test, not the exam two-thirds of men want to avoid. It was the most likable pharma ad of the night, it won the Pharma Lions Grand Prix at Cannes, and it carried a message that could save lives. It’s also the first regulated-industry brand in this series, and it shows the trap every regulated industry marketer will recognize: when paid media is the only channel legal can fully control, the ad becomes the operating system—and everything the ad can’t say gets handed to someone else. The lessons apply whether you’re a solopreneur with one LinkedIn post or an enterprise brand with a $16 million-per-minute investment.

Key Insights

Novartis built a real program around a 60-second spot: a year-round NFL partnership, on-site PSA screening events at team facilities, six advocacy partners, an educational hub, and a Cannes jury, calling it “integrated from the Super Bowl to Social to PR.”
The whole campaign exists to kill one false belief—roughly two-thirds of men avoid screening because they think it starts with a rectal exam. That’s an objective designed to change behavior, not to raise awareness, and that’s why the joke is the message.
In a regulated industry, paid media is where every word can be reviewed before a human sees it, so it gets the budget, the talent, and the strategy.
RelaxItsABloodTest.com is a hub that points elsewhere: the quiz lives on the Prostate Cancer Foundation’s site, the locator is ZERO’s, and the guidance is the AUA’s. When a man searches “prostate exam or blood test” in October, the answer engines will cite whoever published the most credible explanation—and right now, that’s not Novartis.
The site’s email signup is the single most valuable asset in the system—a permission-based list of men who have already raised their hands—, and there’s no evidence it’s being used to turn a February spike into a September reminder.
iSpot scored it the most likable pharma ad of the game. EDO, which measures what people actually do online after a spot airs, ranked it 75th—behind Novo Nordisk (10th) and Boehringer Ingelheim’s screening spot (23rd). Loved is not the same as acted on, and that’s a system signal, not a creative failure.
“Relax, it’s a blood test” is the hook. “It’s a blood test and a conversation with your doctor” is the truth. A spot can carry one. Owned media exists to carry the other, at every size of organization.

The PESO Model® Diagnostic: The Novartis Tight End

Sometime in the second half of last season’s Super Bowl, a bunch of NFL tight ends were lounging in hammocks, floating in pools, and getting massages while Enya played.

Then Bruce Arians—the former Buccaneers head coach, and a prostate cancer survivor since 2007—told every man watching to relax his tight end. Because the first screening for prostate cancer is a blood test, not the exam everyone is terrified of.

Monday morning, everyone had a take on the joke. (Rob Gronkowski saying “relax your tight end” is the platonic ideal of a Gronk line.) I’m not going to lie. My 12-year-old sense of humor STILL thinks that’s funny.

Regardless of the joke, that’s not the conversation we should be having. The one we SHOULD be having is what happened to the 40.3 million age-eligible American men who have never had a PSA test once the spot stopped running.

That’s what we’ll cover on this month’s PESO Model® Diagnostic. Each month, I run a high-visibility, award-winning brand through the lens of the PESO Model Operating System®—not to dunk on great work, but to show you what a truly integrated and measurable program looks like out in the wild.

So far, we’ve diagnosed Budweiser, Liquid Death, Peppa Pig, HubSpot, and Duolingo.

This diagnosis is the first one inside a regulated industry, and I chose it because we spend a lot, A LOT of time inside regulated businesses, including pharma. And I can tell you from experience that every one of them runs the way this campaign runs: advertising leads, and everything else sort of follows. Sometimes. If they can get approval to do more.

What Novartis Did

The spot is the only part anyone talks about, and it’s the smallest piece of their entire campaign.

“Relax Your Tight End” is a 60-second film from Fallon, starring Arians alongside Gronkowski, George Kittle, Tony Gonzalez, Greg Olsen, Colby Parkinson, Vernon Davis, and Delanie Walker.

One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and the eight men in the short represent that statistic. Caught early, the relative five-year survival rate is above 99 percent. The first step is a blood test.

At reported Super Bowl spot rates of $8 million or more per 30 seconds, it was an expensive minute—and Novartis’s second in a row, after a 2025 breast cancer screening spot.

But it was more than just a 60-second spot during the game. Novartis is the NFL’s official pharmaceutical partner, which gives the campaign a calendar instead of just one game day. They can be seen during the Draft, at training camps, and during Hall of Fame weekend—plus they have on-site PSA screening events at team facilities.

Freaking brilliant!

And they do actual blood draws; they don’t just hand out brochures. They have six advocacy partners, a campaign social media handle, and an educational hub, RelaxItsABloodTest.com.

Underneath all of it, there is one insight they consistently message: roughly two-thirds of men avoid screening because they think it starts with a rectal exam. The whole campaign exists to kill one false belief.

In June, the Pharma Lions jury gave it the Grand Prix. Jury president Tracey Brader’s rationale reads like a PESO Model® checklist: “Based on a relatable human truth. Appropriate to the audience. Deploying celebrity authentically. Integrated from the Super Bowl to Social to PR. Bold. Humorous.”

Credit Where It’s Due

Obviously, they did so much right to win the Grand Prix. In addition to Brader’s rationale, they also:

Led with an objective. Not awareness of prostate cancer—everyone is aware. The goal was to change a belief that was blocking a behavior and to create action. That’s the most disciplined pharma brief I’ve seen in years, and it’s why the humor works…the joke is the message.
They kept it unbranded and meant it. No product, which I know is a regulatory thing, but it’s also incredibly hard to do, especially when this much money is being invested. Novartis does sell a treatment for advanced prostate cancer, so this isn’t charity, but the campaign doesn’t push anything, and the Pharma Lions jury gave it a second award in the unbranded film category for a reason.
They know how to measure outcomes when they want to. After the 2025 breast cancer spot, Novartis reported an 8 percent increase in mammograms among women under 40, a 10 percent increase in sonograms, and a 70 percent lift in traffic to Susan G. Komen’s site. It’s too early to have those kinds of results from this year’s Super Bowl ad, but they know how to affect and track behavior numbers.

So why does the whole system still feel like it’s standing on the ad?

The PESO Model® Lens

Paid Media

Paid media is the strongest layer in this campaign, and it’s not even close. A national 60-second spot in the second half of the Super Bowl, a league partnership that provides year-round distribution, and creative that iSpot scored as the most likable pharma ad of the game.

In a regulated industry, paid media is where every word can be reviewed before a human sees it. So it gets the budget, the talent, and the strategy.

Paid media isn’t supporting the system here. Paid media is the system.

Earned Media

Launch week was exactly what a Gronk exclusive buys: entertainment and sports outlets, a CNN wellness piece on men’s fear, a Fox Sports feature on a tight end’s own family history.

All really good earned media. But also all about the ad.

What I couldn’t find is the earned media that lives in the problem: urologists pitched as sources during Men’s Health Month, local coverage of the 52-year-old Browns fan who got a PSA test in a parking lot, and caught it early.

That’s the coverage that outlasts the celebrity—and the kind an AI answer cites when a man asks at 11 p.m. whether he really needs the exam.

The launch coverage should be a spike in an operating system. The operating system needs a pulse.

Shared Media

They definitely used shared media as distribution with a campaign handle and a “spread the word” toolkit.

What it’s missing, though, is shared media as community, and prostate cancer has one of the most active survivor communities on the internet, run in part by the advocacy partners in this coalition.

Right now, the campaign sits next to those communities rather than inside them.

Owned Media

If I were Novartis, I would spend the next dollar on owned media.

RelaxItsABloodTest.com is a hub that points elsewhere.

The risk quiz lives on the Prostate Cancer Foundation’s site. The locator is ZERO’s. The clinical guidance links to the American Urological Association.

And I get why that is in a pharma organization, because it’s much easier to get approval for things you don’t own than for those you do. But having done something similar for another pharma brand, I know that the quiz, locator, and guidance CAN sit on the brand’s site, as long as they remain unbranded.

I would 100% use my MLRO points to get approval to unlock blocked content on the Novartis site, because this campaign’s best asset is a year-round calendar of screening events.

This is how a $16 million ad spend sends its traffic to somebody else’s domain, so the brand that paid for the attention ends up with none of the authority.

When a man searches for “prostate exam or blood test” in October, Google and ChatGPT will answer based on whoever published the most credible explanation.

Right now, that’s not Novartis.

To make matters worse, the Novartis site has an email signup. That’s a permission-based list of men (and the people who love them) who have already raised their hands to get more information. This is the single most valuable asset in the system. It’s what turns a February spike into a September reminder.

I can’t find any evidence that it’s being used that way.
Integration

Let’s look at their integration now. I know it was lauded as being integrated, which is real, but it’s also one-directional.

Paid media created the moment. Earned media covered it. Shared media distributed it. Owned media caught what was left.

The Pharma Lions jury was right that the campaign is integrated across the Super Bowl, social, and PR. But therein lies the challenge. It was integrated from the Super Bowl. Everything downstream, nothing upstream.

A PESO Model Operating System runs the arrows both ways—events generate earned; earned feeds owned; owned grows the list; the list tells you where to send the screening truck next.

Everything in the system compounds the work, and it continues to work while you sleep (which is the ultimate goal).

Measurement

And then, of course, we have measurement.

EDO, which measures what people actually do online in the minutes after a spot airs, ranked it 75th of all Super Bowl ads—behind Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill spot (10th), Boehringer Ingelheim’s screening spot (23rd), and Hims & Hers (19th).

So it was an ad people really loved—but didn’t act on.

This is not a creative failure; it’s a system signal.

Boehringer’s spot was also about screening, and it drove more than twice the median engagement.

The difference between a viewer laughing and a viewer searching is whether the system gave him something to do next that didn’t feel like homework.

To be fair, the number that matters most—did more men get PSA tests?—hasn’t been published yet.

We know that the 2025 campaign proved Novartis can measure behavior, so the missing number is still forthcoming (which is another issue in pharma; we’re always waiting on lagging numbers).

Either way, the arrow from paid back to the business isn’t drawn, which is what I look at when I do these diagnoses.

The Regulated-Industry Trap

Even still, the failure mode wasn’t “coordinated versus integrated” or “a campaign isn’t a system.”

It’s that when paid media is the only channel legal can fully control, the ad becomes the operating system—and everything the ad can’t say gets handed to someone else.

And I understand why.

A broadcast spot goes through review once. A blog post goes through it every time you touch it. A journalist’s follow-up goes through it never, which is why so many pharma comms programs consist of sending the release and praying, and certainly never being able to share it on their social networks. And a patient community is, from a compliance perspective, an adverse-event-reporting nightmare with a comment section.

So the depth gets outsourced.

There is a nuance the ad can’t hold. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force still says that PSA screening for men ages 55 to 69 should be an individual decision made with a doctor, weighing the real benefits against the real risks of overdiagnosis.

The campaign site, in line with urology guidelines, suggests starting the conversation at age 45. I’m not adjudicating that. I’m pointing out that “relax, it’s a blood test” is the hook, and “it’s a blood test and a conversation with your doctor” is the truth.

A 60-second spot can carry one of those. Owned media exists to carry the other—and right now that half of the sentence lives in partner PDFs and whatever AI model a man asks at 11 p.m.

What This Means for You

You don’t have $16 million or a Gronk. But you do have a version of this problem, because every organization has a channel that gets the easiest approval—and quietly organizes itself around it.

Here’s what it looks like at all-sized orgs:

If you’re a solopreneur or a small team, your “Super Bowl” is the one thing that reliably works. It might be the LinkedIn post that pops, the webinar that fills, or the referral partner who sends leads.
That’s your loud, controllable moment, and the trap is treating it as the strategy. The fix is the cheapest one in this article. Write the one evergreen explanation of the thing you’re known for and put it on your own domain, not LinkedIn’s.
Then use the list you already have. If you’ve collected emails from a webinar or a lead magnet and haven’t sent them anything since, you have Novartis’s problem on a one-thousandth of the budget.

Get a nurturing campaign going ASAP. One useful message a month is far better than nothing at all, or even one loud announcement each year.

If you’re a mid-size team, you almost certainly have partners doing your owned media job—the association that hosts your research, the vendor whose blog runs your best case study.

Audit where your best content lives.

If the answer is “on someone else’s domain,” you’re renting authority, the answer engines will attribute it to them, not you.

Bring the reference piece home, get it reviewed once, and point your earned media toward the problem you solve rather than the launch you just had.

Because the problem is what people (and machines) search for in October.

If you’re an enterprise brand in a regulated category, the constraint doesn’t just shape what you can say. It decides what you build. Three moves survive review.

Turn the hub into the authority: one evergreen, reviewed explanation of what your campaign is about, updated when the guidelines change, earning citations for 5 years.

Point earned media at the events, not the ad. For instance, every screening event at a team facility is a local story with a built-in visual and a built-in survivor.

And use the list—the September reminder is the same reviewed message sent to people who asked for it, which is the smallest review burden in the whole system.

Across all three sizes, the questions are the same:

Which channel is doing the talking because it’s the only one that gets approved?
What did you hand to partners that you should own?
Are you measuring being loved, or acted on?

Here’s the thing most teams underestimate, and I say this having watched it inside more than one regulated marketing organization: undoing this isn’t a content problem.

It’s an operating system problem.

The people inside stopped seeing the constraint years ago, because it looks like “how we do things here”—and nobody sees it until someone from outside draws the arrows.

Novartis made the most likable pharma ad of the Super Bowl and told men something that could save their lives.