Pharma companies have been part of the global economy and our health systems for centuries. Novartis can trace its origins back 250 years, while Eli Lilly is celebrating its 150th year and Bayer traces its first days back to 1863.
For most of that time, however, pharma companies were content to exist in the background. The products they produced, including medicines, vaccines and consumer goods, were front and center in their marketing approach.
Communications and awareness campaigns also focused on the disease areas they catered to. The company itself was largely left working behind the scenes. In recent years, however, that has begun to change.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought pharma into the spotlight like never before. Companies like Pfizer, Regeneron, Moderna and BioNTech became household names as the world eagerly awaited news and updates on drugs and vaccines against COVID-19.
Many pharma companies saw an opportunity to step out of the background and into the limelight. Rebranding, new logos and louder communications became the name of the game in the post-pandemic world.
That has continued into 2026, with companies like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk now also household names thanks to their GLP-1 products and the cultural phenomenon that has come with them.
In a new series, Fierce Pharma Marketing will interview Big Pharma marketing leaders about how their companies are evolving their marketing cultures, defining what they stand for in 2026 and rethinking the industry’s reputation, public understanding and corporate role.
In our first interview in the series, we talk with Lina Polimeni, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, consumer, at Eli Lilly.
Sports, health and everything else
“From a brand perspective, we have been on this journey of building the Lilly brand in both culture and from a marketing perspective for around five years now, really since the Tokyo Olympics,” where the company sponsored Team USA, Polimeni said.
“It’s been not only a journey of the positioning of the branding, but through the campaign we are telling the story about who we are and why that matters to people, as well as the importance of health in general.”
Sports have become a major way for Lilly to tell that story. Outside of the Tokyo Olympics, Lilly is also doubling down on the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games while continuing its work with basketball players.
That includes its recent tie-up with Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark for a new ad campaign that zeroes in on health.
There is an obvious association with athletes for Lilly, too. They are typically at peak fitness and health and extremely aspirational, “but they also show you what’s possible in the presence of health,” Polimeni said.
It also has parallels for Lilly’s scientists.
During the Paris Olympics, Lilly ran a campaign called “One Body.” This was based on the idea that a swimmer, for instance, knows at a young age that they want to go to the Olympics, but “everybody tells them: ‘You’re crazy. You’re absolutely crazy. Like, nobody gets to the Olympics,’” Polimeni explained.
But with grit, determination and a lot of training, they do.
“And if you look at what scientists do, it’s the same situation,” Polimeni said.
That work is less visible to the public, she said, which can make it easy to overlook the years of science behind pharma R&D.
“But there are people who dedicate an entire career, like 30 years of their life, to one molecule that actually never makes it to market but inspires the knowledge for the next discovery,” Polimeni said.
There is also a bigger game plan at play for these projects. Lilly’s campaigns are built around an annual theme, Polimeni said, giving the company a broader structure for telling its brand story. As Lilly marks its 150th year, that framework is also shaping how the company brings its history and purpose to life.
Patient-centricity is common language across pharma, Polimeni said, but Lilly tries to make that idea more tangible by keeping the person receiving the medicine at the center of its work.
“Everyone in the company really sees a person on the other side of the prescription. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone from the CEO and the executive committee down to, you know, manufacturing operators who are closing the boxes that go to people. It’s really about the person. And so, there’s a humanity that you’re going to notice in the way that we execute not just the creative, but the way the brand comes to life,” Polimeni said.
Lilly decided to celebrate its big birthday with the moniker “150 years of everything else.” The idea is for it to represent genuine birthdays.
“Big moments, happy moments, sad moments, everything that happens in everybody’s life. And the idea is that that’s what’s possible when health is present,” Polimeni said.
Pharma’s ‘iconically bad advertising’ problem
For Polimeni, there’s still work to be done in how pharma markets itself.
“My frustration over the years as a marketer has been: Our companies make medicines that literally change people’s lives, so why do we have the worst creative? When the purpose is so high, why do the best creative designs go to things like soap or toothpaste?” Polimeni said.
Pharma has developed a reputation for “iconically bad advertising,” she said, even as health should be central to how people talk about their lives.
Too often, she said, pharma marketing narrows that conversation to symptoms and products: “Do you have this symptom? Here’s a medicine.”
That framing misses the larger role health plays in people’s lives, Polimeni said.
So, for Lilly, the idea is to get away from that and redirect the conversation to health.
“We know in sports that this is when families come together, so we know that’s the best time to talk about things like Alzheimer’s.”
But Polimeni is adamant this must not be done as a traditional public service announcement.
“This must be a discussion that happens organically,” she said.