Pfizer Continues to Dominate DTC Ad Spending

If Pfizer chose not to do direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, we'd have less bad ads to criticize (as, for example, this ad for Viagra) and the total spending on DTC advertising would be 30% less than it is today. In 2014, Nielsen estimates that the U.S. drug industry spent $4.53 Bn on DTC advertising. Pfizer spent $1.4 Bn.

That's right... Pfizer spends nearly one-third (30%) of all the DTC ad dollars!

The last (red) bar of the following chart shows what the 2014 ad spend -- excluding Internet search ads -- would look like without Pfizer. We're talking 20th century numbers!

Pfizer simply is too big to fail as far as the DTC advertising world is concerned!

According to Bloomberg (here), Pfizer spent "$751.9 million on television ads, more than double second-biggest spender AbbVie Inc." This domination of the drug ad airways goes back to at least 2011 as shown in the charts prepared by Bloomberg.

Dear Patient, Come to the "Dark Side" & Engage with Pharma

Engaging patients was a major theme of the eyeforpharma Barcelona 2015 conference (hashtag e4pbarca), which just closed out after 3 days of presentations with a keynote presentation by Dr. Anne Beal, Chief Patient Officer, at Sanofi.

"Patients can help in many ways and we (pharma) have to reach out to them all," said Dr. Beal.

@TuLupus -- a Spanish Lupus patient blogger ("Tu Lupus Es Mi Lupus")-- was impressed and she offered this advice (as quoted by Paul Tunnah):

"patients, don't be afraid of going to the 'dark side' - engage with pharma and industry (is not so dark)."

"It's one of the most important things I've learnt in #e4pBarca," tweeted @TuLupus a few minutes later. "Dark side? No way! We need each other and you do great things."

Dark side? Let's imagine Pharma as Darth Vader and patients like @TuLupus as Luke Skywalker:

Scary Pharma/Drug Ads in Medical Journals

Drug print ads aimed at patients are usually upbeat showing the benefits of the pill. Print ads intended for physicians on the other hand are often dark and downright scary. I came across this medical journal print ad about "poorly controlled LDL-C" yesterday:

Click on image for an enlarged view

What's up with this?

Attending #e4pbarca Remotely: Second Day

There's been a lot of tweeting during the eyeforpharma Barcelona conference yesterday and today. I summarized a few of the issues being discussed that were of interest to me during yesterday's session (see here). Here's some impressions data from Symplur for the #e4pbarca hashtag:

I'm happy to see that I'm #3 on the list! That's pretty good for someone following remotely in a time zone that is 5 hours later than the time in Barcelona! I had to wake up at 3 AM yesterday to catch the opening presentations! Compare that to a day in the life of a typical digital marketer here.

Today, I woke a little later and missed most of the morning sessions, but there was still a good deal of interesting insights from attendees.

Attending #e4pbarca Remotely

I'm getting up early to attend the 13th Annual eyeforpharma Barcelona 2015 conference from the comfort of my home office.

Disclosure: eyeforpharma is a client of mine - Pharma Marketing News is a Media partner for this event. But this post is a bit of "earned" media coverage - i.e., no one is paying me to do this.

Mostly, I'm using Twitter and following the #e4pbarca tweet stream, which is pretty active. I recommend that all conference producers use specific Twitter hash tags like this to allow people who cannot physically be at the conference to at least follow what's being discussed in real time. Make sure you keep your hash tags as short as possible! Also, make sure everyone at the conference has access to Wifi and knows the hash tag.

I've embedded the #e4pbarca tweet stream at the end of this post.

I will post here some highlights from the conference of interest to me. Also, I'm hosting my first ever Google+ "Hangout" to see if I can interview some conference attendees during the lunch break. You can access that Hangout here.

So, here are some highlights so far. I will add more during the day:

DTC Ad Spend is Back Stronger Than Ever, Baby!

OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but according to Wonkblog, a blog published by the Washington Post, and based on data from Kantar Health, "drug companies are bombarding your TV with more ads than ever."

"Maybe you've noticed that prescription drug ads are everywhere these days — more so than usual," quips the blog. "It was just a few years ago that TV advertisements of prescription drugs had dropped off by 20 percent, as drugmakers were also cutting back on other types of direct-to-consumer advertising" (read, for example, "Pharma DTC Ad Spending Took a Nosedive in 2012!").

According to Kantar Media data, the pharmaceutical industry spent $4.5 billion marketing prescription drugs directly to consumers in 2014, up from $3.5 billion in 2012. That's up from the $2.5 billion drugmakers spent in 2000, or $3.39 billion in 2015 dollars when adjusted for inflation, according to Wonkblog. Most of that spending -- about 65% -- is on TV ads.

Here's my chart showing DTC spending on "measured media," which includes print ads and Internet display ads, from 1998 through 2014.

FDA's Reprint Distribution Guidelines are "Counterintuitive" & "Indecent"

FDA's Reprint Distribution Guidelines are "Counterintuitive" & "Indecent"

A Pig, a Cow, a Robot, an FDA Warning Letter

In a March 5, 2015, Warning Letter to Discovery Laboratories, Inc. (here), regarding its Surfaxin promotional website, FDA cited "evolution" as a false claim of superiority. Well, not exactly.

FDA noted the phrase "Join the Therapeutic Evolution...", which was used in conjunction with graphics of a pig, a cow, and a human-like robot (see screen capture below).

Click on image for an enlarged view.

Here's what the FDA had to say about the pig, the cow, and the robot:

A Day in the Life of a Typical Digital Marketer vs. My Day Yesterday

I was sent an email from a reader of Pharma Marketing Blog directing me to an infographic about the day in the life of a digital marketer. You can view the entire graphic here, but I want to focus on the section reproduced below and compare that to what my day looked like yesterday. You can compare it to your own day and see if you fit the pattern.

Click on image for an enlarged view.

So how typical is this?

FDA Develops a Mobile App for Reporting Drug Shortages. But Wouldn't an App for Adverse Events Better Fit the Agency's Mission?

FDA/CDER launched its first and only mobile app on iTunes: DrugShortages (see logo on left).

The iTunes blurb suggests the public would find this information important:

"Access to drug shortage information is now easier and faster. FDA has developed an app that allows users to quickly identify current drug shortages, resolved shortages, and discontinuations of drug products. This app was developed to accelerate public access to important – and sometimes critical -- information about drug shortages. The application uses a searchable database to provide real-time information to key stakeholders, including health care practitioners and pharmacists."

I'm not sure how useful this app is for the public versus HCPs who definitely would like easy access to such information. According to the blurb, the app "helps health care practitioners make quick decisions about patient treatment."

More importantly, the app "provides information on how to report a shortage or supply issue, and links to other resources from FDA". Of course, the general public would not find this feature of the app very useful.

But an app that would be VERY useful for HCPs and patients is an app that provides easy access to adverse event data and that allows users to report adverse events. This, I believe, would better fulfill FDA's mission: to "protect the public health by assuring the safety, efficacy and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices..."

What would such an app look like? I used the DrugShortages screen to create what I call "DrugAE," a concept for a mobile app that I hope the will FDA launch on iTunes soon. Here's my concept:

In a Major Turnaround, FDA Now Requires "Low-T" Drug Label Changes & Safety Studies: Warns of Stroke & Heart Attack, Inappropriate Prescribing

FDA characterizes today's Safety Announcement requiring label changes for drugs that treat "low testosterone" merely "an update to the FDA Drug Safety Communication: FDA Evaluating Risk of Stroke, Heart Attack, and Death with FDA-Approved Testosterone Products issued on January 31, 2014." But it is obviously much more.

According to today's announcement,

1. FDA is "requiring that the manufacturers of all approved prescription testosterone products change their labeling to clarify the approved uses of these medications. We are also requiring these manufacturers to add information to the labeling about a possible increased risk of heart attacks and strokes in patients taking testosterone."


2. "[FDA is] also requiring manufacturers [ of approved testosterone products to conduct a well-designed clinical trial to more clearly address the question of whether an increased risk of heart attack or stroke exists among users of these products."

This is worlds apart from what the FDA said on January 31, 2014 regarding this issue. It is also worlds apart from what Public Citizen petitioned the FDA to do in February, 2014.