Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards - 2024

Campaign: Acute Dental Pain Management Guidelines for Adolescents and Adults
Agency/Firm: N/A
Client: American Dental Association

The American Dental Association was faced with a challenge regarding one of the most important health subjects, acute dental pain management. Early this year, the group had to get the word to dentists about new guidelines for treating tooth pain in adolescents and adults without using addictive opioids.

For its public outreach campaign, the ADA was working from new guidelines to prescribe nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen, alone or along with acetaminophen to treat toothaches. The ADA worked with communications teams at several partner organizations and developed a marketing push that covered news wires and social media to spread the information. The press blitz reached an audience of 447 million people, through news outlets, including The Associated Press, the ADA said.

The research behind the new guidelines was the second-most downloaded from the Journal of the American Dental Association, with 9,500 downloads, the group said.

The ADA also managed a social media campaign with 10 posts that reached 316,000 impressions, the group said. The ADA’s push was deemed so successful that it’s now being used as a model for other health organizations and government agencies, the ADA said.