Eli Lilly has spent the last several years reintroducing itself to the public via a series of corporate campaigns. Its latest push continues that effort but also goes a step further, inviting viewers to join the self-styled “medicine company” if they share its ethos.
The newly launched “Seeking” campaign centers around a minute-long short film in which Lilly puts out a call for “exceptional people to do exceptional things,” including “[finding] a treatment where there isn’t one.”
The most promising candidates, per the commercial, are those that are “unsatisfied, emotional, defiant” and who “take things personally.” They “will be hard on the problem to make it easier on the people” and “refuse to accept medicine as it is—so they put themselves in a position to change it.”
As the voiceover recites the aspirational job listing, images on screen flash between scientists in labs, patients in hospitals and people living their everyday lives, backed by a soundtrack of strings building to an urgent crescendo.
Toward the end, the screen fades to black. White text cycles through specific positions that Lilly is currently “seeking” to fill—clinical research physician, medical science liaison, manufacturing operator—before ending on an all-encompassing call for “applicants” alongside the URL for the company’s careers hub.
The very public hiring drive puts Lilly in contrast to many of its peers in the biopharma industry, which continues to be rocked by waves of layoffs and restructuring efforts.
The film will run on linear TV through the rest of 2025. The broader Seeking campaign, set to roll out only in the U.S., will also include shorter films highlighting different areas of the company, online and social media content and both print and out-of-home ads.
“This campaign is the latest installation of the growing body of work to help describe the core of who Lilly is—a medicine company that puts health above all. We do this in the ‘Seeking’ campaign by showing what it takes to work at Lilly through the lens of those we seek to work and partner with,” Lina Polimeni, Lilly’s chief corporate brand officer, said in a statement to Fierce Pharma Marketing.
“We’re looking for people who share our dedication to challenging the status quo in the name of improving health to join us in helping make life better for people around the world,” she added.
In an interview with Fierce earlier this year, Polimeni walked through Lilly’s recent branding push.
It began with the launch of the company’s first-ever corporate campaign during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, in which it reintroduced itself as “a medicine company.” In 2023 and 2024, the subsequent “Get Better” campaign expanded that introduction with more details about “who we are and what we do,” per Polimeni.
This year’s set of promos—which include another short film that debuted during the Grammy Awards in February with an aim of encouraging early detection of breast cancer—are focused on joining conversations about “what matters to people,” she said.
“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,” the exec explained.