As the women’s NCAA March Madness tournament draws to a close, Eli Lilly is aiming for a slam dunk of its own.
The Big Pharma is set to serve as the title sponsor for a pair of events hosted amid the women’s tournament Final Four and Championship games this weekend in Tampa, Florida, all with a goal of encouraging early detection of breast cancer.
Friday, Lilly will sponsor the first-ever Women’s College All-Star Combine, during which dozens of top college players hoping to go pro will train and compete in front of an audience of WNBA scouts before the league’s draft takes place later this month.
During the combine, all of the players will be wearing jerseys featuring the number 99, a reference to the American Cancer Society’s estimate that when localized breast cancer is detected early, the five-year relative survival rate is 99%.
A day later, on Saturday, the Lilly Women’s College All-Star Game will take place. Held the night before the women’s March Madness final, the exhibition game will feature standout players from across the NCAA. Throughout the day, at the game’s venue in Tampa, Lilly will team up with Black Health Matters to host an event offering free mammograms and educational resources about the importance of early detection.
Elsewhere, throughout the championship weekend, Lilly will be partnering up with several individuals from the basketball world to “amplify the message and tell their own personal stories,” a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma Marketing. The group will include broadcasters Hannah Storm and Andraya Carter, coaches Lisa Fortier and Dawn Staley, and players John Wall, Courtney Vandersloot, JuJu Watkins, Bree Hall, Aneesah Morrow, Dillon Hunter and Chase Hunter.
“Lilly is proud to sponsor the Women’s College All-Star Game and inaugural Women’s College All-Star Combine, and to use this sponsorship to build on work we launched earlier this year around the importance of early detection of breast cancer,” Lina Polimeni, Lilly’s chief corporate brand officer, said in a statement. “This event attracts a diverse group of fans from all over the country and allows us to bring greater awareness to what is most important to Lilly: our health.”
That earlier launch Polimeni mentioned centered on a 60-second unbranded ad that Lilly debuted during the Grammy Awards broadcast in February.
The “Hands” film focuses on a woman’s hands as she goes about her daily life. At one point, she appears to feel something suspicious during a breast self-exam, and the commercial ends with her visiting a doctor for a more formal examination, while a message on-screen reads, “The most powerful way to fight cancer is in your hands. Most cancers are curable when caught early.”
In an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing shortly after the ad’s launch, Polimeni discussed Lilly’s habit of chiming in on “key cultural conversations” to “redirect to health”—whether the Grammys, the Olympics, the Oscars or, now, March Madness—saying, “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.”