Should pharma advertising die?
Robert Solomon
Consultant, coach, and workshop leader, author of the widely read and respected book, "The Art of Client Service," expert in achieving behavior change with advertising/marketing/PR agencies, clients, and individuals.
My Dad had three brothers, each with a different career: ?one was an attorney, another an accountant, a third a PHD chemist.?? There was one thing, though,? all four had in common:? heads bereft and barren, smooth as bowling balls.? That I still have hair (at my age) came as something of a surprise, until an enlightened doctor told me that hair is maternal, not paternal.? Thank you Mom.
Even so, I am in a never-ending battle with a steadily encroaching, crown-of-my-head bald spot, prompting me to engage in combat with a twice-daily dose of Minoxidil, the generic term for its formal pharma name, Rogaine.?
In its early days Rogaine was a prescribed medication you only could receive with a doctor’s prescription.? Marketing the drug, such as it was, was done largely through sales calls to physicians, until, as my media friend Ellen Wasserman reminds me, it became a pioneer in direct-to-consumer television, among the very first prescriptions of its kind advertised to consumers this way.
At the time pharma advertising was at best an afterthought; most broadcast work was devoted mainly to beer, soft drinks, automobiles, and other durable and perishable goods.? But over time the category grew, with agencies learning to navigate the FDA’s strict, sometimes arcane rules and regulations on what you could claim and what you couldn’t, things like “fair balance” and disclosure of each drug’s lengthy risks and side effects, including a disclosure of a drug’s prescribing information.? Advertising could sidestep most of the rules if it spoke about a disease and not a specific drug, but this trade-off obviously came at a cost.
Back then most general agency staffers – Creatives especially – couldn’t be bothered with pharma, which explains in part why specialized healthcare agencies emerged to support clients.? Over time the pharma category grew – in 1998 expenditures were a not trivial 1.2 billion; by 2016 it had grown more than four times as large, to $5.2 billion – as many other spending categories stagnated or declined.
How big has the category become?? According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, “Pharmaceutical advertising now makes up a major portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising in the U.S. each year”, last year accounting for, “30.7% of ad minutes across evening news programs on ABC,?CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC.”?
With jobs becoming increasingly scarce in traditional general, direct response, and sales promotion agencies, I couldn’t help but notice that an ever-growing number of my former colleagues have migrated to pharma shops.? What once was an afterthought has emerged as a central source of job opportunity for agency people, one of the few available in today’s contracting advertising climate.?
Recently, however, I read a New York Times story that quotes the new administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy, Jr., who, “repeatedly and enthusiastically called for a ban on such ads,” contending that, “’drug ads are steering sick Americans toward useless medications, contributing to high rates of chronic disease in the United States.’”
Knowing my advertising background, at lunch one day a doctor colleague asked how I felt about pharma ads.? In truth, I explained, I’m ambivalent.
Not because of the reasons Kennedy cites? – he’s more ignorant than informed – but rather because most of the advertising, at least the commercials I see, are deplorable, weighed down by those necessary but cumbersome FDA rules.? The stuff on social media?? Equally bad,? (Then again, virtually all broadcast advertising, regardless of category, is turgid, devoid of ideas, and dismissible.)?
I’m ambivalent because I have friends and colleagues who would be job casualties if pharma advertising came to an end.? You think it selfish to be so directed?? I might not like the advertising, but I like the people, so yes, call me selfish. ?Guilty as charged.
In the end, though, it matters not.? Pharma is a powerful lobbying presence, and this administration, for all its posturing and bluster, pays attention to special interests armed with deep pockets.? It will pay attention to pharma and ignore Kennedy.
Advertising will continue, the same as it ever was.