Insulin for Free? Eli Lilly and Company’s Twitter Disaster
Insulin in the US is a product that has been steadily rising in price for the past twenty years but is not something we as Brits with our NHS have comprehended. Americans, however, aren’t as fortunate, watching insulin’s price increase tenfold in twenty years. This is why the Pharmaceutical brand Eli Lilly and Company were shocked to see on November 10th 2022 their American customers rejoicing at the news that their medical bill prayers had been answered, that insulin bills were no more. Why were customers thinking this? It all started when Elon Musk bought Twitter.
Eli Lilly and Company, like many companies, found the ‘town square’ nature of Twitter to be the quickest and easiest way to dispense information to their consumers — or at least they did. After his purchase of the social media giant, Musk began changing the Twitter landscape. He introduced ‘Twitter Blue’, a service giving customers paying $8 monthly a Blue verification tick mark and priority within feeds, features that until this point had only been afforded to ‘notable people’ or businesses. Whilst Musk cashed in, he forgot the simple reason verified badges had been created in the first place, to help verify to Twitter users which accounts were genuinely businesses and notable people. The lack of differentiation between previously verified accounts and newly bought and upgraded Twitter Blue accounts was bound to cause confusion, and Eli Lilly was the first target of internet bandits using the uncertainty to take down the company.
It’s fair to say that insulin prices have been a topic of debate for quite some time, with rises from around $25 a vial in 1996 to $250 in 2016. So high were they in fact, Eli Lilly decided to preemptively reduce the price of its generic insulin Lispro by 40% in 2021, meaning drastic price reductions were not uncommon for the company. When a new Twitter Blue account under the @/EliLillyandCo tweeted out “We are excited to announce that Insulin is free now.” American consumers were ecstatic. With a lack of strong online presence on their actual verified Twitter account @/LillyPad, people didn’t deduct that @/EliLillyandCo was a fake, and the tweet spread. Within eight hours, @/LillyPad tweeted out a clarification which led to Eli Lilly and Company’s stock price dropping ‘more than 6%’ and wiping out $15B from its market cap. Discussion by news networks and politicians centred around ‘obscenely high’ insulin pricing further embarrassed the company.
After their corrective tweet, Eli Lilly and Company all but withdrew their Twitter presence, refusing to tweet since and withdrawing millions in advertisement on Twitter. The results of this has led businesses to ask ‘are social media platforms the best way to connect to our consumers’? As Balkan argues, just as “Facebook connects you to Facebook Inc.” as does Twitter, and not necessarily to the brand you want to engage with. The checks to verify brands and companies need to be more stringent, and with Meta beginning to offer ‘Meta Verified’ for their Instagram and Facebook platforms and Twitter considering introducing ‘Twitter Gold’ for businesses to have a differentiating gold check mark for $1000 a month, it’s beginning to look like these networks are losing their appeal as the ‘easiest’ way to connect to consumers, but it’s certainly where digital discourse is being created.
