Image of Hilary Gentile*
Jury

Hilary Gentile*
Global Chief Strategy Officer
McCann Health

NEW YORK, USA // Hilary has been with McCann Health for 20 years and last year marked her promotion to the newly created position of Global Chief Strategy Officer. Her creation of the Future-Scape tool and the launch of a Social Science department within McCann Health has helped to establish her as an expert and influencer in her field. Her extensive experience with new product launches, business planning, and helping companies unlock truths to drive customer behavior, has made her a trusted advisor to some of the largest pharmaceutical companies as both a consumer and professional expert.

As Global Strategy Officer for McCann Health, Hilary is responsible for leading strategy teams and driving integration through all agencies across the globe. Partnering with global clients, Hilary marries creative and critical thinking to solve high-level problems for her Fortune-500 clients, including her extensive experience with many health and wellness companies including, GSK, J&J, BMS, Lilly, AZ and Novartis. This work has ranged from portfolio strategy, to system architecture, to forward planning, to establishing a brand or company’s meaningful role. Hilary partners with her team and clients to understand the why’s behind people’s actions, unearth cultural and psychological truths to influence the confluence of the wellness stakeholder ecosystem; doctors, advocacy, IR, patients, payers, health systems and pharmacists.

In pursuit of defining problems which catapult a business to enable brands to compete more effectively, Hilary regularly conducts Rapid Hacks, Truth Hunts and Co-Creation sessions across the globe. Utilizing Futurescape provocations, the McCann Health strategy teams have partnered with their clients to unlock meaningful roles, accelerate transformation, pivot to a new hybrid world of virtual and physical engagement

Guided by the belief that data has a point of view, Hilary and her team have a designed unique system to data-led insights. By harnessing the power of AI, through synthesis of taxonomies of personality, values, and bias, McCann health’s Empathy engine will transform understanding to action for foundational brand engagement and ecosystem activation.

In addition to CSO for McCann Health, she serves as the Global Wellness practice lead across MWG, which includes bespoke solutions on home, retail, tech and finance. She is also on the executive team for Truth About Wellness, partnering with our MWG Intelligence unit, Truth Central. She recently authored a global study, Truth about Doctors, which involved nearly 2,000 doctors in 16 markets across 5 continents.

Coming from a family with 9 doctors, Hilary studied biology, sociology and histology at Smith College. Hilary guest lectures at the University of North Carolina in the Health Marketing Program on Positioning and Branding. This year, she is judging a competition on Business Plans for COVID vaccine and treatment asset candidates. She recently spoke on a panel at AdWeek about “New Data-Driven Strategies Using Data for Good”, followed by being published by WARC in AdMap Magazine on “How Health Brands Can Combine Medical and Consumer Data to Play a Meaningful Role in People’s Lives.” She is a frequent keynote speaker for key clients and industry associations including Bayer, BMS, Actelion, Janssen, and ISMPP. She has served on Effie’s judge, as a J&J Burke Awards Judge, and most recently as a panelist for Populus Telehealth symposia. As a testament to her contribution to the industry she was inducted into the MM&M Hall of Femme.

Her family continues to inspire her, as her husband and children drive her to be a better person and appreciate every moment. She values the connections in her life, as she believes that to be successful you must connect and build trust with people. She is a true problem solver by nature and is constantly in pursuit of excellence.