In healthcare, complexity can easily obscure meaning. Scientific progress moves quickly, but public understanding often struggles to keep pace. People are overwhelmed with information, while the topics that matter most to their well-being become harder to communicate clearly.
Making healthcare science meaningful requires helping people understand what scientific progress actually changes in their lives. Translating complex ideas into something relatable and memorable is the real challenge, especially when attention is limited, and emotion shapes engagement. In those moments, clarity and empathy are what cut through.
Linda Liu, a Marketing Strategist at Leo (Publicis Groupe), has built her career working at that intersection. With degrees in Psychology and Economics from Yale University, Liu brings a perspective that bridges analytical rigor with a deep understanding of human behavior in healthcare communication.
Her recent strategic contributions on Pfizer’s 2025 Super Bowl campaign, Knock Out, offer a clear example of this approach. By reframing the narrative of cancer research, the campaign achieved record-breaking emotional engagement scores and drove millions of meaningful health actions.
Based on Liu’s methodology and her experience across major Publicis and Pfizer initiatives, we have distilled five essential principles for turning complex science into human stories.
- Stop “Dumbing It Down” and Start “Translating”
A common misconception in healthcare communication is that scientific ideas must be heavily simplified for the public to understand. But oversimplification often strips away meaning and leaves audiences with vague, forgettable messages.
Linda Liu’s approach reframes the task. The goal isn’t to strip the science down; it’s to translate it into something people can emotionally connect with. In Liu’s view, the strategist’s role is to preserve the integrity of the science while finding the emotional entry point that makes it feel human and relatable.
In the case of the Knock Out campaign, oncology science is incredibly complex. Rather than trying to explain mechanisms of action in a 30-second spot, Liu and the strategy team focused on finding a metaphor that carried the emotional truth of the science: the fight.
The fight is a universal human metaphor. In Knock Out, that spirit came to life through a young boxer pushing forward against resistance, a visual symbolizing determination, effort, and the refusal to back down. These themes mirror how many patients describe their own cancer journeys. By grounding the story in that emotional truth, the campaign gave audiences an intuitive way to connect with the work without oversimplifying the science.
The takeaway is simple: don’t underestimate your audience. You don’t need to remove the science; you just need to give people a way to feel what it represents. Translation makes the work human; oversimplification makes it hollow.
- Find the “Behavioral White Space”
Every industry tends to gravitate toward a dominant emotional tone. In luxury cars, it’s a status. In insurance, it’s security. In oncology, for decades, that tone leaned toward sadness and solemnity. The traditional pharmaceutical ad script is well-worn: soft focus, melancholic music, and a patient gazing wistfully out a window. This framing, while respectful, often positions the patient as passive: someone things happen to, rather than someone actively navigating their own experience.
Liu’s strategic work on Leo’s Pfizer Corporate Branding team focused on identifying a behavioral white space, an emotional territory that felt underexplored in the category. Her approach starts from a simple truth: human motivation is not monolithic. Sadness and fear are genuine parts of the cancer experience, but many people also describe determination, grit, defiance, and a deep desire to fight.
“When we looked at the data and the cultural sentiment, we saw a disconnect,” Liu explains. “Many ads leaned somber, but patients described their experience in terms of effort and resilience. There was space for a brand to reflect that fighting spirit more directly.”
By shifting the narrative from passively enduring cancer to actively confronting it, the team tapped into a deep emotional reservoir. The result was one of the most emotionally engaging ads of the Super Bowl, with more than half of viewers reporting intense feelings of hope and inspiration.
From Liu’s work, one principle becomes clear: analyze the emotional landscape of your category. What are other brands making people feel? If most of the industry gravitates toward “safe and soft,” there may be strategic value in exploring a tone that feels bold and resilient.
- Use Behavioral Economics to Understand the “Why”
Linda Liu often refers to herself as a behavioral strategist, a perspective that shapes how she approaches healthcare communication. Her work sits at the intersection of how people feel and what motivates them to act.
Her guiding belief is that data without context is just noise. In Knock Out, the emotional storytelling was designed to capture attention, but it was never meant to stand alone. The real objective was to pair that emotion with a clear path forward, because behavioral economics shows that people disengage when the next step feels confusing or overwhelming.
That insight shaped the campaign’s direction toward PfizerForAll, a platform designed to reduce friction in navigating healthcare and make the next step feel actionable. The Super Bowl moment became the start of a broader journey, driving 3.2 million people to explore the platform.
The lesson is straightforward: a great story is not enough. Effective healthcare communication must account for the cost of engagement. The work succeeds when emotional connection and practical accessibility meet in the same moment.
- Anticipate the Reaction Before It Arrives
One of the most overlooked parts of communication is predicting how people will respond before a campaign ever launches. In healthcare, the “opponent” is often skepticism, misinformation, or apathy. A strategist has to anticipate the questions, doubts, and cultural headwinds, especially when launching a campaign about a subject as sensitive as cancer research.
This is where Liu’s work in competitive intelligence becomes essential. Through The Pulse, a weekly publication she leads, Liu monitors cultural conversation in real time. By analyzing social listening data and competitor moves, she helps teams anticipate how the message will likely be received.
For Knock Out, the team anticipated skepticism around a pharmaceutical company claiming emotional ground on the Super Bowl’s biggest cultural stage. The solution was to ground the narrative in breakthroughs, progress, and lived human resilience rather than corporate self-congratulation. It’s a habit Liu traces back to her background in competitive fencing: reading intention before the action.
Don’t launch your story into a vacuum. Anticipate the counter-arguments, understand the cultural mood, and bake the answers into the narrative before the questions even arrive.
- Validate Creativity with Rigorous Data
There has long been a tension in advertising between data-driven analysis and creative intuition. Data teams often prioritize predictability and risk mitigation, while creative teams push for emotional resonance and originality. Liu’s work demonstrates that these approaches are not at odds. In high-stakes healthcare communications, they must be integrated.
Liu played a key role in the message-testing work for Knock Out, which examined not only whether the ad resonated, but how it shaped emotional response and perceptions of progress in oncology. Using tools like System1, the team quantified emotions such as “hope” and “admiration,” demonstrating that these emotions were not abstract ideas but measurable signals of effectiveness. The data showed a meaningful shift toward perceptions of innovation, with a +25-point increase among exposed audiences.
The evidence gave the creative team the freedom to be bold. With a strategy grounded in data, the brand had the confidence to take a risk on one of the most scrutinized stages in advertising.
The success of Pfizer’s 2025 Super Bowl campaign was not an accident. It was the result of deliberate, creative architecture that honored the truth of the science, protected the emotional integrity of the story, and ensured that every moment led people to something meaningful.
Linda Liu’s work illustrates what the future of healthcare communication demands. As science becomes more complex, the need for strategists who can bridge scientific progress with real human experience will only grow.
By refusing to oversimplify, identifying the emotional white space, and grounding creative risk in real human behavior, brands can build something more valuable than awareness. They can earn trust. In healthcare, trust is the most valuable currency.
For brands, the takeaway is simple: the work resonates most when it feels human, clear, and connected to what science makes possible in people’s lives.
