Promotional Spending in 2013 of the Top 20 Big Pharma Spenders

I found an interesting table in the May 2014 issue of MM&M that presents promotional spending data for the top 20 -- based on total spend -- US pharma companies. The source of these data is a Cegedim Strategic Data (CSD) "Audit."

In this post I summarize some of the data in charts that you may find interesting.

According to CSD, these top 20 companies spent a total of $14,784 Bn on traditional professional detailing, eDetailing, Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertising, professional meetings, and journal advertising. This does NOT include the cost of supplying drug samples. Here's a chart showing how much each company spent totally versus on DTC:

Click on image for a larger view.

Obviously, some companies spend a great deal on DTC  (e.g. Pfizer), whereas others spend $0 or close to $0 on DTC. I'm sure that varies year to year and depends a lot upon the type of products being promoted and the life cycle stage they are in.

But what is the overall allocation of the promotional spend of these 20 companies? What portion of the spending pie is devoted to professional detailing, eDetailing, DTC, professional meetings, and journal advertising?

Here's the pie and all the slices representing spending in each category:

Click on image for a larger view.

How representative is this of the entire industry? I'm not sure, but I estimate these numbers represent about 80% of the total spend of ALL pharma companies. So, I'd say that the pie chart above reasonably accurately reflects the industry as a whole.

What's immediately evident from the pie chart -- aside from the practically 0% spent on journals ads -- is the minuscule fraction spent on "eDetailing." 2% of the total is $217 million, which is only "minuscule" comparatively speaking. More important, however, is the fact that this percentage has not changed since I've been keeping track of eDetailing despite the 20 to 30% decrease in the number of live sales reps. That is, don't blame the Internet for layoffs of salespeople, despite what I had said earlier (read "Pharma Reps' Worst Fear Is Near: Outsourced to the Internet!" and "eDetailing Technology Spells Death of Traditional Pharma Salesman & Birth of 'Sales Cyborg'"). 

But, I have to be careful. Analysts differ on exactly what they mean by "eDetailing." CSD, I believe, does not include in this category "e-Mailings" and "e-Meetings" (see the chart in this post: "U.S. e-Detailing Spending Up 74% in 2012. Yet Pharma Still NOT 'Digitally Mature.'").