Insulet has unveiled “The Pod Drop,” a music campaign aimed at people with type 1 diabetes.

According to Lucas Escobar, head of U.S. consumer marketing at Insulet, the project is designed to expand the parameters of what to expect from marketing in an increasingly competitive category. “We continue to push the boundaries and approach our marketing in unconventional and creative ways by giving people with type 1 diabetes the opportunity to talk about their diabetes and educate others about it,” he says.

One of those unconventional approaches included the update earlier this year of Omnipod Bay, a family-friendly diabetes-themed island that first launched in 2022 and is integrated into Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizon video game. Insulet manufactures and markets the Omnipod tubeless insulin pump.

Omnipod Bay and a more recent campaign built around the creation of “The Pod Drop” (a Pod Change theme song) with YouTube sensation and musician Andrew Huang have another important goal: to get people with diabetes talking and sharing.

“We hope that through our campaigns we can empower the diabetes community and give back to them by enabling them to have conversations that weren’t necessarily possible before,” Escobar explains. He cites the example of “a middle school student who wants to talk a little more with his friends about what he’s wearing on his arm and wants to talk about his diabetes.”

Escobar thanks the Omnipod users for planting the seed that eventually became the song.

“Our Omnipod community, which we call Podders, is constantly sharing content every day and tagging us. And we try to look for common themes in that content,” he says. “Some of the most shared videos are pod swaps. People are changing their pods and as they’re doing these moves, it’s almost like the ‘get ready with me’ trend.”

Escobar and the Omnipod team found inspiration for the new campaign in this Podder content, he adds. Soon an idea was born: “What if we sampled the Podder sounds and made a Podder song out of them?”

The team quickly enlisted Lexie Peterson, a content creator with type 1 diabetes, and Andrew Huang, a musician with 2.4 million followers on YouTube. After Peterson explained the process of changing pods, Huang created an electronic track with the sounds of a pod change. The track includes everything from the sound of peeling off the packaging of a new pod to the beep after the pod is filled with insulin.

Visitors to the Omnipod site can download the one-minute song and add it to their personal playlists or social feeds. For every social post that includes “The Pod Drop,” Omnipod will donate $1 to Breakthrough T1D (up to $5,000).

The insight into daily life with diabetes that the campaign offers is part of a broader change, Escobar believes.

“Social media offers a really powerful benefit to the diabetes community that didn’t exist before: the more people share, the more others are encouraged to share a little about type 1 diabetes too,” he says. “It’s an invisible disease that you don’t often see in movies or on TV – and when it does appear, it’s often a misrepresentation of diabetes or living with diabetes. Social content and incorporating diabetes into culture strengthens the community and helps educate others.”

Escobar hopes the campaign will achieve two different outcomes: “The song needs to bring a smile to the community’s face and make them feel seen, heard and represented. But ‘The Pod Drop’ is also a creative way for them to continue to educate and inspire others about living with diabetes,” he says.