Eli Lilly Harnesses First-Party Data to Transform Its Customer Experience

The Challenge

Eli Lilly and Company has the mission of turning science into healing to make life better for people around the world. The company, founded 150 years ago, is known for its work to address some of the world’s most critical health challenges, including diabetes, obesity, mental health, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. Lilly was the first company to mass-produce the polio vaccine and insulin, and is also known as maker of Prozac and numerous other life-changing medicines. Today Lilly’s medicines help more than 51 million people globally.

Lilly had an ambitious and transformative goal: To expand from providing therapeutics at one point in the customer journey to serving customers along their full health journey.

They had rich first-party data for each step of that journey, from digital engagement to product to customer support, and realized its immense value. However, as is the case in many companies, their data was complex and lived in silos and across multiple clouds. They needed to unify this siloed data to be able to understand it, act on it, and build the most accurate, connected customer view possible.

Permissions and privacy were top concerns. Lilly has dozens, if not hundreds, of “front doors,” with over 50 externally-facing websites alone. A customer might have given different permissions at different touchpoints along their journey. Lilly had to make sure they could recognize that customer at every touchpoint and act on the customer’s wishes in each context. As Steve Rommeney, Associate Global VP of Engineering, Platforms, and Capabilities posed the challenge, “Are we seeing customers the way they want to be seen? If the customer is standing in front of me today, we want to make sure we can pass that test.”

As they explored solutions, the Lilly team prioritized those that would keep them ahead of evolving customer expectations and regulations. They would design for the future.

The Solution

The Lilly team selected LiveRamp for onboarding and activation to maximize the brand and business value of their data over time. LiveRamp pioneered the category of data onboarding, the process of bringing offline data online and matching it to online identifiers to create a more connected, 360-degree view of the customer and increase marketing efficiency and reach. LiveRamp’s cloud-first, platform-agnostic technology minimizes the need for data movement and is designed to handle an extraordinary volume of data safely and securely.

Trust is paramount to Eli Lilly, given the sensitivity of their data and their proud 150-year legacy. LiveRamp was a natural fit with its uncompromising standards for privacy, security, and compliance.

LiveRamp resolved Lilly’s customer data, which includes personally identifiable information, to pseudonymous RampIDs. When enhanced with LiveRamp’s robust Live/Identity capabilities, RampID—the most durable, privacy-centric identifier for connecting the ecosystem—ensures matches are identified with a level of accuracy and fidelity that simply isn’t possible with other solutions. RampID eliminates dependencies on the third-party cookies and mobile identifiers that are quickly becoming obsolete.

The Results

With LiveRamp’s support, Lilly has built its enterprise data backbone. The team has found that onboarding and freeing their data from siloes makes governance easier and unifies consent while improving consistency and speeding innovation and scale.

By investing in their first-party data, the Lilly team also feels confident they are doing the right things to prepare for the rapidly changing digital marketing ecosystem. They can face cookie deprecation and privacy changes without trepidation. As Steve Rommeney puts it, “Imagine if these changes had happened 10 or 20 years ago, when none of the capabilities of today existed. Think about how much harder it would be.”

Lilly is also set up with broad activation capabilities. Once data is onboarded with LiveRamp, brands are plugged into a premier global ecosystem with incomparable scale and reach. LiveRamp is integrated with hundreds of destinations, including demand-side platforms, data management platforms, measurement and attribution providers, creative personalization platforms, social networks, and search engines, and the number continues to grow.

This means that once data is onboarded, brands have seamless direct-to-platform activation to reach authenticated audiences at scale. They can connect with their most valuable customers wherever they are spending time, anywhere in the world, and maximize their marketing impact. They also have a strong foundation for strategic collaborations, cross-screen measurement, and other innovative data collaboration use cases.

Looking ahead, Lilly can continue to transform and orchestrate the customer journey across channels for all its brands, products, and services. As they streamline and connect the end-to-end customer journey, delivering personalized experiences where they matter most, Lilly will be able to help more people around the world lead healthier lives.