Working at Eli Lilly & Company

May/10/2008 07:35 Filed in: Working in pharma
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This past week I was asked if I liked working at Eli Lilly and although there are some things that I did not agree with at Lilly the answer to that questions has to be a resounding "yes". I was lucky enough to work with some very talented people at Lilly including a DTC manager who was extremely talented in marketing and a Director who had a consumer marketing background. However, I am passionate about the Internet as a tool to empower patients and as thus never felt that Lilly was doing enough to leverage the Web.





The people who were "selected" for the Cialis brand team were the best of the best. The launch of Cialis, behind market leader Viagra and second to market Levitra, was a major launch for Lilly. Not only were we going to spend an enormous amount of money for the product launch but we were going to show two people in a bath tub which was a major coup for a very conservative midwest pharma company. We had a lot of agencies working with us and to ensure that we were all on the same page we held agency integration meetings so that we could all share information and open up the lines of communication. Looking back I find that I was extremely lucky to be part of that experience and through that experience I continued to learn and grow as an individual.


When we submitted our NDA to the FDA we were first given an "approvable letter" and had some additional time before we could launch in the US market. This was the same time that Eli Lilly for the first time was going through a "reallocation" (layoffs). There were quite of lot of people who were reallocated including some from the Cialis Global brand team. However, some people who were laid off or offered packages at the US Affiliate were not exactly the best of the best. I learned later that the people who were offered packages were people who had not really excelled in their positions. To this day I find that the people who took the packages and were laid off for the most part to be a little bitter especially at the people who stayed.


Since Cialis was a joint venture between Lilly and Icos we had to justify every dollar and use every metric we could to show results. Our DTC manager, Paula, I am sure had a lot of sleepless stress filled nights as she struggled to show success so that she could get more money. On the one hand she had to fight for dollars and then fight us off for asking for more money for our individual programs. Matt, our team leader, held us all together by communicating what was happening and why so that we had a better understanding of the total picture.


So at times it was a difficult environment for us to work but in the end we did what we had set out to do and that was make a difference in a very competitive marketplace. There have been a lot of negative things said about Lilly in the media recently around Zyprexa and I only can say that what I have read is NOT the company I knew an worked for. Yes I have said some things about Lilly here as well but only because my passion of believing that we are here to make a difference in patients lives is so important and what better way to do that then the Web?


The one area that pharma, including Lilly, needs to be really cautious about is the loss of passionate people. These are the people who will drive new programs and do whatever they need to do get managements buy-in on new media to engage patients and consumers. In the end, despite the layoff's, companies will get stronger as a new breed of DTC marketers takes the helm. This is the continued evolution of pharma as they strive to meet the challenges of the new marketplace but I am confident that they will come out of this better and stronger organizations.
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