To commemorate its 150th anniversary and the arrival of a college basketball star in his home city, Eli Lilly released a video about how medicines impact lives.
Indianapolis-based Lilly will celebrate its 150th anniversary next month. Although the full-fledged anniversary celebration is still a few weeks away, the company decided to start some of its campaigns early with the NCAA Final Four basketball game being held in Indianapolis this weekend. A spokesperson for Lilly said the basketball game created an early cultural moment in Lilly’s hometown.
Lily’s video begins with the message, “It’s easy to think of medicine as being about disease.” For the rest of the movie, Lily insists that medicine is actually about health.
“When people talk about what the drug meant to their loved one, they never describe the treatment. They describe life afterward: birthdays, love, and Tuesday nights with the people that matter most,” Lina Polimeni, Lilly’s chief marketing officer and consumer, said in an email.
Lilly’s films use footage of people in a variety of situations to convey their ideas, from everyday activities like brushing their teeth to milestone events like weddings. The voiceover says, “None of us have been here long enough, but as long as we’re here together, we all deserve a chance to be who we’re meant to be.”
The film is the anchor of Lilly’s broader 150 Years of Everything Else campaign. Lilly’s campaign includes high-impact outdoor messaging, as well as national print, digital and social communications. The company plans to incorporate this campaign into shared cultural moments throughout the year to connect its medicines with the everyday experiences they enable.
Lilly’s focus on connection is based on years of building its corporate brand. Since launching our first-ever corporate campaign during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Lilly has continued to communicate that we are a pharmaceutical company that values health above all else.
In the era of direct-to-patient (DTP), a pharmaceutical company’s brand is likely to become increasingly important. Lilly is wary of this fact, with CEO Dave Ricks recently discussing the possibility of building relationships with DTP customers to help the company maintain market share as cheaper, off-patent rivals may enter the market.
