THERANOS The story behind Elizabeth Holmes’ Errol Morris commercial

In 2012 Theranos hired the renowned marketing firm TBWA/Chiat/Day on a retainer of $6 million, which soon increased to $11 million. The company still did not have a working product after a decade of work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Still, Theranos decided to advertise to the masses what was essentially a fairytale: the notion that they could run hundreds of blood tests on a single drop (or just a few drops) of blood. As part of their work together, Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, was front and center in the media and starred in a bizarre, yet hypnotizing, commercial shot by celebrated documentary film director Errol Morris (Thin Blue Line, Gates of Heaven, Tabloid, Vernon, Florida.

For The Drop Out podcast, Rebecca Jarvis spoke with Mike Peditto and Stan Fiorito, who were working with the exclusive Chiat/Day at the time. Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani flew into L.A. on a private jet for their first meeting and were treated like royalty when they arrived. Elizabeth’s voice, they said, sounded like a “man robot,” and she carried herself with an air of power.

Elizabeth pitched to the agency that her company’s mission was “to change the world,” which inspired a lot of employees to want to work on the campaign. It gave people a sense of purpose. They were really taken in by the idea of a single drop of blood and wanted to focus on that as a major part of their imagery, and they wanted to focus on people’s faces and eyes.

This included the haunting commercial of Elizabeth’s face against a white background, which was directed by Errol Morris. The spot, which was published on YouTube, and aired throughout the Phoenix, Arizona TV markets, features Elizabeth promising to deliver a “basic human right,” that people don’t know they have.

“People don’t even know that they have a basic human right to be able to get access to information about themselves, and their own bodies, that change their lives,” Elizabeth says while staring into the viewer’s soul. “Every person should have the ability to get that type of test because if you understand that early that you’re at risk, there’s a lot more that you can do about it. And we’d like to see a world in every person gets access to this type of basic testing, and the types of test are ones that provide insight into the onset of disease in time to do something about it.”

However, as time went on, Elizabeth would sometimes go dark. She would evade answers sometimes and would focus on things like finger puppets. It was during this finger puppet demonstration that her voice changed from its regular deep and measured tone to a higher-pitched “child-like” voice.

Sunny would seem offended when they asked him questions, and although they had a multi-million dollar contract, Theranos had trouble paying their bills.

The firm also ran into trouble with the facts that they could include in their advertisements. The claims, like performing hundreds of blood tests on a single drop of blood, had to be true then, not aspirationally true.

One time Mike Peditto asked them where the labs were in Phoenix Walgreens, and they told him that they have not built a lab yet. It was then that they realized they were FedExing blood samples from Pheonix to Palo Alto, California to get the blood test results. The Chiat/Day employees were shocked to find out that the testing wasn’t being done onsite at Walgreens stores. Part of why they were doing this was to avoid having to havd FDA clearance on performing tests in the stores.

Another lie Theranos told Chiat/Day was that the boxes were already being used by the US military in Afghanistan. The fact that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, General James Mattis, and former Secretary of State George Shultz made that claim seem legitimate. It wasn’t. Theranos devices were never used by the military.

Theranos pulled their relationship with the company “out of nowhere.” Mike says long after his ties were cut with Theranos he would Google “Theranos scam” to see if they had been found out. He also worried if cops would show up for him at any minute to question then about Theranos.