The CMO Who Refused to Let Healthcare Marketing Stay Boring

Welcome back to The Friday Fortune! We’ve reached that magical point in December where calendars are optional, inboxes are ignored, and every meeting mysteriously ends with “let’s revisit this in January.” Holiday parties are stacking up, year-end recaps are everywhere, and productivity is… aspirational at best. So if you’re mentally checked out but still pretending to be “on,” you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

Each week, we bring you smart, sharp insights from the world’s top CMOs, creative leaders, and culture-shapers, because even in the final days of the year, great ideas don’t take PTO.

From bold brand-building plays to thoughtful leadership lessons worth carrying into the new year, we’re here to help you close out 2025 inspired, entertained, and maybe even a little smarter than when you opened this newsletter.

Here’s what’s on deck this week:

• A sit-down with Eli Lilly Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Lina Polimeni and President of Wieden+Kennedy Portland, Jason White

• Advertising forecasters’ advice for 2026

• Sacramento Kings x OpenFortune

📈 Marketer of the Week

If there’s anyone redefining what it means to build a brand in healthcare, it’s Lina Polimeni, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Eli Lilly and Company.

Alongside Jason White, President of Wieden+Kennedy Portland, this conversation pulls back the curtain on how a 150-year-old pharmaceutical company is being transformed into one of the most human, emotionally resonant voices in modern marketing.

Lina doesn’t shy away from the scale of the challenge. After spending more than two decades at Lilly—across sales, global marketing, and leadership roles—she knew that if the company was going to truly connect with people, it needed to move beyond being product-focused and start telling human stories. Stories about purpose, illness, hope, and the real lives behind medicine.

That belief led her to one very specific conclusion: there was only one agency that could help bring that vision to life. And that’s Wieden+Kennedy. What followed was less a pitch and more a pursuit. Lina openly admitted she had to “reverse pitch Wieden+Kennedy three times” after initially being told no.

Jason explained why that hesitation existed in the first place. “We’re independently owned. Where a lot of people see dollar signs, we look for the intent of the brand. We look for the right client. We want to understand their ambition.” What ultimately won W+K over wasn’t the category, but Lina’s ambition to change it.

That ambition has since resulted in some of the most talked-about healthcare brand work in years. Rather than defaulting to the industry’s formulaic advertising, Lina pushed for creative partners without pharma experience. She made this a requirement because she never understood the disconnect between the category's noble purpose—health, medicine, people's lives—and its consistently poor creative output.

Her frustration was deeply personal. After 21 years of listening to patients talk about how disease interrupts their lives, she couldn’t reconcile why household products often had better creativity than pharmaceutical advertising. For Lina, regulations weren't the problem. She believed that if you approached every project by asking what you'd want your own mother to know about a medicine, then regulations became a responsibility rather than a limitation.

Jason credits the success of the partnership to how hands-on and uncompromising Lina is about the work. She attends every shoot, participates in every creative review, and makes the final decisions. But rather than slowing things down, that involvement created trust. Jason compared it favorably to the agency's relationship with Nike, noting that the combination of healthy conflict and mutual belief is rare.

The result? Work that doesn’t just perform, but inspires internally. Jason shared that after Lina visited the agency, people were approaching him saying they wanted to work on Lilly.

But Lina’s vision goes far beyond advertising. One of the most striking parts of the conversation focused on Lilly’s push to change how disease is portrayed in film and television. After sponsoring a study with USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Lina uncovered a startling insight: out of nearly 10,000 speaking roles in top films and TV shows, less than 1% portrayed chronic diseases, despite 128 million Americans living with one.

Rather than criticizing from the sidelines, Lilly chose to partner directly with Hollywood. The company now works with screenwriters, producers, and studios to provide education, medical context, and creative support, helping ensure stories remain compelling while reflecting reality more responsibly. Importantly, the brand stays in the background, allowing culture to lead.

Lina and Jason’s Takeaway

Lina’s leadership philosophy is rooted in confidence earned through action. A lesson from her father still guides her today: In her words, “Take the task even when you feel you don’t know what you’re doing. You will gather strength as you do it.”

Jason’s advice is equally human. Reflecting on his time at Beats by Dre, he shared the wisdom from his former boss that stuck with him most: “What does your gut tell you?” He added, “He taught me that the gut is something you can train yourself to listen to and you can really hear it and it speaks quickly. But if you know how to hear it you know what you really deeply think inside.

To hear more about how Lina is reshaping healthcare storytelling and how Jason is guiding one of the world’s most iconic creative agencies forward, listen to the full episode of CMO Weekly.

🥠 The Cookie Jar

Crack open a handful of the week’s best marketing links—because good fortune favors the curious.

• How advertising forecasters are advising brands for 2026. 2026 forecast: Partly cloudy with a 100% chance of pivot.

• Goodbye, Upside Down: Marketers are mourning the end of ‘Stranger Things’. After 9 years of Eggo placements, marketers finally have to find a new show where waffles make sense.

• How OpenFortune Helped the Sacramento Kings Create a Winning Lunar New Year Moment. (feat an INSANE QR scan code rate)

• Magnum Ice Cream Company names Publicis media AOR, with AI in focus. Nothing says 'pleasure' like algorithmic optimization of your indulgence.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Friday fortune.

If you enjoyed the read, pass it along to your favorite marketer who could use a little extra inspo in their inbox.

Until next time, may your marketing be memorable and your cookies always be fortunate!

— The OpenFortune team