Anna Ross
Executive Director, Strategy and Insights
VMLY&R Health
A People-First Approach For the Win
A leader driven by human behavior, Anna Ross has architected some of the most influential health campaigns in the modern era—inspiring smokers to quit, convincing skeptics to embrace preventive health, and perhaps, most notably, helping people overcome vaccine hesitancy.
Vaccines are a delicate space, influenced by hardwired beliefs shaped by cultural, political, emotional, and behavioral factors. Anna’s approach acknowledges the spectrum of hesitancy and relies on dialogue over persuasion. It’s an upgrade to fact-checking and myth-busting which, in Anna’s view, doesn’t work.
Most recently, this insight led to a global, purposely unbranded, campaign that launched in social channels in 2022 to reengage vaccine-cautious people with vaccination. Instead of challenging vaccination beliefs head-on, the campaign recognized that questions about vaccines have been around as long as the vaccines themselves and ignited curiosity, engaging vaccine-cautious people in productive dialogue.
Anna believes that humans are people first—then patients. She knows how to synthesize data from various sources—first-party data and market research, ethnographies, search, and social listening—to get to insights that reflect the real world. Her obsessive curiosity extends far beyond focusing on “life with a disease,” exploring all aspects of culture, lifestyles, and beliefs. It’s been the catalyst for life-changing creative campaigns. Anna believes that life-changing creative is a team sport, a practice that draws on a range of experience both in and out of healthcare, and that cultural trends often sit at the intersection between categories that drive human behavior across the board.
With 20+ years’ experience across health and non-health categories (including LG, Coca-Cola, Nicorette, Amtrak, and Colgate), her fascination with the intricacies of human behavior is counter-balanced by a solid academic grounding. Anna has an MSc in molecular biology and genetics and an MBA in marketing. She is also bilingual in English and Russian.
Ultimately, Anna’s well-rounded experience, skillsets, and achievement—along with her proven ability to translate insights into life-changing strategic communications—puts her among the ELITE pharma strategists. From women’s health and smoking cessation to vaccine confidence, her work has had a huge social impact that continues to change lives.
