Eli Lilly is a 145 year old company responsible for some of the greatest breakthroughs in modern medicine. While some of Lilly’s medicines are well known, most people hadn’t heard of Lilly. And the few that had believed it was just a part of big pharma.

The Lilly masterbrand needed to build a stronger reputation with consumers. And could distinguish Lilly from the category and build a reputation of its company and its medicines. The two problems we faced were complicated. First, Lilly had very little awareness in the category. Second, the pharma industry was widely the second most distrusted industry in America (second only to the government). So, we not only had to raise awareness in a distrusted category, we had to have that awareness include convincing people that we were a company in a distrusted industry that you could trust.

Col. Eli Lilly founded the company in 1876 in part to protect people from questionable characters peddling unreliable elixirs to suffering people. And ever since Lilly has put patients’ health first. It’s why Lilly puts one of the highest percentages of revenue of pharma-industries back into research and development. As one Lilly employee said, “We aren’t here to advance people’s agendas. We’re here to save lives.”

Lilly’s believe in putting health first was in direct conflict with the cultural shift taking place that reprioritized health and science, which was ironically happening in the middle of a global pandemic.

This created a reason to for Lilly to take a stance, one that was built into Lilly’s DNA. Our message was simple: In a society that has de-prioritized health, Lilly believes in putting health first, not just the health of some of us, but the health of all of us.

Lilly’s brands traditionally target audiences based on ailments, but, with the task of introducing the Lilly master brand we needed to think bigger. This meant speaking to an audience that didn’t have the prior knowledge or positive associations of a Lilly brand. We defined this audience as those who care about health, believe they can make a change, and are vocal about sharing their beliefs, which skewed younger than the typical health care audience.

Lilly’s Olympic sponsorship was at the heart of the plan. The 2021 Olympics were the first games ever postponed for health reasons, and the first year Team USA had an official pharma sponsor. We used this huge cultural moment to build the campaign around, with TV, OOH, print, digital and social to introduce Lilly and its belief in putting health above all.

To truly build reputation, we needed Lilly’s message to be presented at the right moments- so we became an Olympic sponsor, which is essentially the greatest health competition in the world. We ran a spot during the opening ceremonies called “Our Collective Health,” a spot that argues that America’s greatness shouldn’t be measured just by Olympic medals, but by the health of each and every one of us.

We then followed up in the Wall Street Journal with an ad that declared that “An economy can’t be healthy if its people aren’t.” And then we added an outdoor campaign reminding people as they walked down the street with masks on due to a covid mandate, that it’s time to take health more seriously.

We then put Lilly’s statement of putting health first into action with a film promoting Lilly’s life-saving $35 insulin program.

For a brand that had never advertised before, that had been lumped into a disliked and distrusted category, Lilly saw a huge increase in Aided awareness (+82%) and Reputation (+308%) against its target audience. The honesty resonated. Not only did people take notice of Lilly, they loved Lilly.

The campaign not only met our objectives, but succeeded far beyond them. Our benchmark for Net Familiarity was +10 points. Our campaign increased Net Familiarity (Aided Awareness) by +17.5 points. Our benchmark for Net Favorability was +7pts. Our campaign increased Net Favorability by +18.7 points. Our benchmark for Net Reputation was +6 points. The campaign drove Net Reputation +8 points.

Proof that building a reputation starts with character. Believing in something.Then acting on it.