So far in 2025, the year’s biggest cultural events have served as launchpads for several of the industry's latest cancer awareness campaigns.
At the Super Bowl this week, Novartis and Pfizer shelled out for minute-long spots pushing regular breast cancer screening and a general cancer risk assessment, respectively. Before they hit airwaves, however, Eli Lilly dropped a breast cancer awareness ad of its own at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards earlier this month.
The 60-second “Hands” film follows a woman throughout the course of several days, focusing in on her hands as she eats, showers, practices piano, sculpts clay and spends time with loved ones. About midway through, she feels something suspicious during a breast self-exam in the shower. The next few clips take on a more somber tone that’s quickly upended: As the woman lays on a couch, staring off into the middle distance, her subdued mood turns joyful when her child playfully pounces on her.
The ad ends with a scene, shot from behind, of the woman seeing a doctor for a more official examination, as text on-screen reads, “The most powerful way to fight cancer is in your hands. Most cancers are curable when caught early.”
“There’s so much empowerment that can come from that understanding,” Lina Polimeni, the company’s chief corporate brand officer, said of the ad’s closing line.
With its push for early detection and treatment, Lilly designed the ad to combat the sadness and despair often linked to cancer diagnoses and instead “create a sense of hope,” Polimeni told Fierce Pharma Marketing in a recent interview.
“We saw that there was a disconnect where most people thought of cancer—which is a very, very serious disease—as this hopeless situation versus, from a medical perspective, there’s so much more hope and empowerment if you detect early [and] have regular screening,” she said. “There’s so many treatment options that open up to you with an early diagnosis, as well as a better prognosis. So, we wanted to make sure we made that connection for women and for people at large.”
Simultaneously, with the choice to debut an unbranded campaign rather than a promo for breast cancer med Verzenio or any of its other cancer drugs, Lilly is hoping to raise “awareness and trust of the company,” Polimeni said.
To the company, that means pushing for broader awareness in areas “where we think we can make a difference,” she said, regardless of whether it leads people to one of Lilly’s therapeutics.
"What was important for us was making sure that women, quite literally, took away the importance of taking health in their own hands," Polimeni said.
The film is a continuation of a branding bonanza the company began several years ago. In its first-ever corporate campaign, launched in tandem with its sponsorship of Team USA at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Lilly reintroduced itself as “a medicine company” that puts “health above all.”
In 2023 and 2024, it rolled out a new campaign, “Get Better,” which built on that introduction by further explaining “who we are and what we do,” Polimeni said. That push included several films in the same vein as “Hands,” like the pair of unbranded obesity films that the Zepbound maker put out around the 2024 Academy Awards and that advised against the off-label use of GLP-1 medications for cosmetic purposes.
As with the choice to premiere the obesity-focused films during Hollywood’s glitzy award season last year, the decision to debut “Hands” during the 2025 Grammys was a deliberate one. Choosing to capitalize on those cultural moments comes down to two important criteria, according to Polimeni.
The first is a straightforward calculation of viewership: “When we have messages of this importance, for us, it’s very important they get to as many people as possible,” she said. “So, obviously, we tend to align with moments where the viewership is and where there’s a lot of reach and frequency.”
The other represents an opportunity to align Lilly’s messaging with “key cultural conversations,” she said, explaining, “It’s not just a matter of a play of eyeballs, but it’s also a matter of making sure that certain conversations happen in the right moment.”
In the same way that the company attempted to “redirect to health” with its obesity ads last year amid relentless chatter about celebrity transformations rumored to be linked to off-label GLP-1 use, Polimeni said, with this year’s Grammys, “we thought it was the right moment to actually, again, redirect to health and say this is something that a lot of women should be paying attention to.”
And there’s more where that came from. The exec said Lilly’s current corporate branding strategy will continue on through 2025 and beyond, albeit with “new creative executions,” as the company chimes in on both cultural and health conversations to lean into “what matters to people.”
“If 2021 was about who we are as a medicine company, and then ‘Get Better’ was about what we do, I think you can anticipate ‘25 being around expressing what our value is, what it takes to be Lilly, why we are different, why we care so much and how our values reflect in the way we approach medicine and people’s diseases,” she said. “Health is always going to be at the center of everything we do, and patients are going to be our starting point.”