Over the summer, while brainstorming ways to call a little attention to Ostro (and have fun in the process), we happened upon the idea of attempting to set a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title. On Wednesday November 12, in partnership with Havas Health Network, we succeeded, setting a record for the most users to take an online artificial intelligence in health literacy lesson in 24 hours.

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In between, we learned an awful lot about branding, marketing, content curation, video editing, verification and online education platforms. We learned even more about the most important part of the exercise: Namely, affirming our commitments to shining a light on the need for greater health literacy and to providing life sciences professionals – and everyone else – the knowledge and tools they need to use AI responsibly.

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What follows are our takeaways from an experience that was both more rewarding and more rigorous than anyone had expected.

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1. It takes a village: 689 people completed the course, including staffers from Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Merck, AbbVie, BMS and more. Ostro’s world record team consisted of the company’s executive leadership (several members of whom appeared in “The Power of AI for Health Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Life Sciences” as trainers), three marketers, two video producers and an editor. Havas Health’s team included a pair of trainers, several creative and design people and a chief of staff who orchestrated it all. Third parties analyzed the course material to ensure that it was up to snuff; a GWR-endorsed adjudicator and an independent post-attempt auditor weighed in at various parts of the process.

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All of this is to say: do not attempt to set a Guinness World Records title unless you have plenty of people invested in the cause. It’s not a casual pursuit.

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2. You must respect the brand: Per Guinness’ style and branding guidelines, Ostro and Havas Health Network didn’t “set a world record.” Rather, we “earned a Guinness World Records certificate” for the most users to take an online artificial intelligence in health literacy lesson in 24 hours. The PDF articulating GWR’s global brand deadlines stretches to 27 pages, including a comprehensive checklist (“client/partner logos should not be next to the Guinness World Records logo, but they should be the same size and prominence”) and five additional pages on brand logo usage. Even the first sentence of this paragraph, with its shorthand usage of “Guinness” rather than “Guinness World Records,” technically violates the official guidelines.

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You know what? We’re all better for it, even if the need to keep “Guinness World Records” plural tied our grammar nerds in a knot. The attention to detail was contagious, which made every outward-facing component of the world record program more consistent and professional. All content and branding organizations could learn a few things from the Guinness – we mean, the Guinness World Records – folks.

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3. There’s no such thing as a simple instructional course: We realized for the umpteenth time that it can be really, really hard to distill what we know about a topic we spend all day living and breathing into content that is simultaneously expansive, concise, high-level and for general audience consumption. As a result, the editing process was a challenge: Multiple versions of the training video came and went as we attempted to calibrate these priorities.

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Along those lines, if there’s a meta-learning here, it’s this: From the inside, your field feels like common sense. From the outside, it’s fog. The record attempt was really just a deadline that forced us to burn off a lot of that fog between AI and health literacy.

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4. Interdisciplinary expertise isn’t easily shared: One of the most surprising parts of the GWR process was realizing how localized expertise can be. Our health literacy folks would look at the draft modules on readability and say, “This is obvious, everyone knows this,” while our AI folks were saying the exact same thing about transformers, prompting and model limits.

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People on each side felt like they were explaining the easy part… and they quietly admitted they were a little lost when the other team started talking. What we actually built, then, wasn’t just a record attempt. It was a kind of forced marriage between two expert cultures that rarely talk in depth.

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Health literacy people learned why “just use ChatGPT” is not a strategy. AI people learned why “just make it simpler” is not a plan. The most valuable outcomes weren’t the slides or the videos, but the moments when someone said, “Wait, I thought that was the easy part,” and then we had to rebuild the explanation so that both domains made sense at once.

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5. Guinness won’t just take your word for it: Nobody expected that they would wave us through without a care. That said, during the buildup to the event, we learned that Guinness World Records has as many guardrails as some of the pharma launches our Havas colleagues have been a part of: Timing windows, evidence logs, screenshots, reviewers double-checking every detail, you name it. As one of the Havas trainers put it: “It felt like the FDA of world records!”

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Subject matter experts viewed the trainers’ content to ensure that it was authoritative and accurate. A third-party verification expert analyzed the results to confirm that all 689 viewers completed both the course and the quiz that accompanied it. There are governmental licensing requirements that are far less challenging to satisfy.

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6. Setting a Guinness World Records title is a lot of fun: On the day of the record attempt, our inter-company Slack lit up with accounts of children and mothers-in-law completing the training. We didn’t ask for age verification, but we know a nine-year-old and an 82-year-old were among the participants. It brought us together in a way that was warm and organic.

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Another thing that stood out was how quickly everyone locked in once the mission was clear. Different teams, companies and time zones united as one. That kind of alignment doesn’t happen often, but when it does? It’s a thing of beauty. And it offers a great and timely reminder of what’s possible when cross-industry initiatives are pursued with spirit, vigor and mutual respect.

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More of this, please. And, for that matter, more of anything that advances the ultimate goals of bolstering the life sciences industry’s AI and health literacy bona fides.

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‍To view “The Power of AI for Health Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of Life Sciences,” click here.