Eli Lilly is continuing its recent pattern of tying disease awareness-raising efforts to major pop cultural moments.
The latest high-profile crossovers—which include a starry TV partnership and the far-reaching rollout of a new campaign—both tie into the drugmaker’s work to draw more attention to Alzheimer’s disease.
Lilly is the maker of Kisunla for early symptomatic Alzheimer’s, though both of its latest initiatives are unbranded.
For one, Lilly partnered with Chris Hemsworth’s Wild State production company on a TV special airing Sunday night on National Geographic and streaming on Disney+ and Hulu starting Monday. “A Road Trip to Remember” follows the actor and his father, who was recently diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s, on a motorcycle trip across their native Australia.
According to a previous release about the special, the father-son duo’s emotional journey is guided by research from Suraj Samtani, Ph.D., of the University of New South Wales Centre for Healthy Brain Aging, who has found that revisiting past experiences and maintaining regular social interactions and community participation may help boost brain health.
Along with the TV special, the partnership between Wild State and Lilly also includes the production of several “video vignettes” in which people with Alzheimer’s describe the effects of the disease on their lives.
Lilly said it teamed up with Hemsworth’s production company to draw more attention to the importance of early Alzheimer’s detection and of providing support to patients and their families as they navigate the disease.
Meanwhile, the Big Pharma is also rolling out a new awareness campaign that, similarly, will feature celebrity voices and take advantage of popular media moments.
At the core of the campaign, developed with Wieden+Kennedy Portland, is a short film titled “Good Days.” The powerful 90-second film emphasizes the stark contrast between and unpredictability of the “good” and “bad” days that people with Alzheimer’s experience. It does so via a montage of high and low moments throughout the life of a woman with the disease—cutting between scenes of her confidently taking her dog for a walk one day and then wandering lost on the side of a road at night, for example.
The films ends with text reading, “We’ve been fighting this disease for over 30 years because of how much the good days matter.”
Lilly is aiming for maximum impact with the film, with placements in movie theaters across the country through late December—including before showings of presumed blockbuster-to-be “Wicked: For Good,” among other new releases—and a national broadcast TV premiere during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, which is expected to draw nearly 30 million viewers.
In addition to the film, the campaign will include out-of-home advertising during the parade, plus a partnership with media giant Condé Nast that’ll see campaign materials shared via brands like Vogue, The New Yorker, Glamour and GQ and at events like GQ’s Men of the Year, Glamour’s Women of the Year and New Yorker Fest.
Elsewhere in the awareness push, Lilly is also tapping several celebrities to ramp up public conversations about Alzheimer’s, its impact and the importance of early detection: Julianne Moore—who joined Lilly for another brain health push earlier this fall—and Mandy Moore, both of whom have played characters with Alzheimer’s, as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger, a vocal brain health advocate.
The pair of Alzheimer’s awareness initiatives are the latest in a string of Lilly efforts that insert disease education into pop culture events, like the short film about early breast cancer detection that ran during this year’s Grammy Awards and another tied to the 2025 Academy Awards taking aim at counterfeit or compounded drugs.
The company has also in recent months shared details of its Olympics and Team USA partnerships for the 2026 Winter Games, sponsored an eczema-focused challenge on an episode of “Project Runway” and brought a breast cancer detection push to multiple women’s pro and college basketball events, among other high-profile awareness drives.
These and other tie-ins are part of a dedicated push in which Lilly is aiming to “redirect to health” amid “key cultural conversations,” as Lina Polimeni, the pharma’s chief consumer marketing officer, told Fierce Pharma Marketing earlier this year.