Lilly lauds scientific, athletic progress in Winter Olympics ad

As the 2026 Winter Olympics get underway in Italy this week, Eli Lilly—a partner of both Team USA and the Milan Cortina Games as a whole—is rolling out a new corporate campaign inspired by the event. The far-reaching “Never Over” campaign will include “a localized 360 campaign in Italy,” a company spokesperson told Fierce, as well as out-of-home ads in New York and Los Angeles, print placements in publications like the New York Times, the L.A. Times and Time Magazine, and digital content throughout the Olympics and Paralympics. At the core of the campaign is a minute-long TV ad that premiered during NBC’s broadcast of the Games’ opening ceremony on Friday. The commercial makes use of nearly a century’s worth of archival footage, per Lilly. Its voiceover, for example, was taken from a 1950s educational film on the scientific method, while its visuals comprise a range of historical and more modern shots of both scientists and athletes at work. The clips play out as the narrator begins listing the steps of the scientific method: observe, question, hypothesize, experiment, test. The last of these is repeated over and over, culminating in shots of bobsled crashes and falls on the ice before the screen cuts to black. “Now, start over,” the narrator says. The process repeats, this time making it all the way to the final step of “share results,” over shots of athletes celebrating, people embracing and a headline reading “Vaccine conquers polio.” Those achievements give way to a quieter shot of an ice skater preparing to head back out to the ice, as the narrator repeats, “Now, start over.” The ad’s concluding message relates the preceding montage of tireless determination to Lilly’s own efforts, proclaiming in all caps that “health is never over.” The campaign highlights the crossover that Lilly sees between its own 150 years of working toward scientific progress and the relentless training that world-class athletes endure in hopes of securing a gold medal, as Jennifer Oleksiw, Lilly’s global chief customer officer, described to Fierce in a December interview. “At each Olympic Games, we believe that athletes are pushing past their limits, and this aligns to Lilly’s pursuit of continuously advancing innovation in order to achieve holistic health for our patients and our communities,” Oleksiw said at the time. “Just as we never stop fighting to advance our medicines, to change human health, the passion and commitment from our athletes both on and off the Olympic stage is really never over,” she continued. “This aligned mission of working through adversity, training really hard, failing along the way, only to get back up again is what aligns and unites us.” The widespread push follows other corporate initiatives that Lilly timed to the 2020 and 2024 Summer Olympics. In the former—which marked the Big Pharma’s first-ever corporate campaign—it branded itself as “a medicine company” that puts “health above all,” while the latter built on that message by expressing a goal of helping people “get better.”