Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20164

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

US DTC TV ads work, Web 'useless'
SCRIP 1998 Sep 16; 2370:

Full text:

Several new surveys of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in the US suggest that television is the medium most likely to boost consumer awareness of a pharmaceutical company’s product, with print ads ranked as second. Link to World Web sites are seen as virtually useless.

At a September 10-11th conference on marketing and advertising, sponsored by the Food and Drug Law Institute, marketing executives from Hoescht Marion Roussel, CBS Television Network and Time Inc described their respective studies on consumer attitudes and reactions to prescription drug advertising in the three types of media. Also summarised was Prevention magazine’s study of DTC advertising (Scrip No 2358, p17).

Kristi Wyatt, director of US copy approval at HMR, described her company’s “rolling” four-week surveys of 25 randomly picked allergy sufferers and 20 users of HMR’s allergy medication, Allegra (fexofenadine), to find out how they became aware of the product, what they intended to do with the information, and what they actually did.

Among the allergy sufferers, 45-60% became aware of Allegra through HMR’s advertisements compared with 10-15% who learned of it from healthcare professionals, she said. Of those who saw an ad, 80-90% saw it on TV and 5-20% in a magazine. Among the Allegra users, 60-80% became aware of the product from healthcare professionals vs only 10-20% from ads. However, of those who saw an ad, 65-80% saw it on television versus 5-30% in a magazine.

Few people in HMR’s survey got any information about Allegra from the company’s Web site, although both the TV and magazine ads referred to it, as required by the “multimedia” approach in the US FDA’s August 12th, 1997, draft guidance on DTC broadcast advertising (Scrip No 2258, p12). For allergy sufferers, only 0-2% visited HMR’s Web site; for Allegra users, 0-9% did so. As a result, Ms Wyatt concluded that the Web is “probably not all that valuable” as a requirement in the final guidance, which is still “in queue”, according to Dr Nancy Ostrove of the FDA’s drug marketing unit.

The dominance of TV ads was also reflected in the Prevention magazine suvery of 1,200 adults, which was referred to by Elizabeth Rockwood, vice-president for business development at CBS Television Network. In the Prevention survey, 77% of respondents reported seeing Rx DTC ads on televison, 63% in magazines, 30% in newspapers, and 23% heard them on the radio.

A Scott-Levin Associates audit for CBS found that patient visits to physicians for allergies increased by 6% between 1996 and 1997, which Ms Rockwood suggested was influenced by TV ads for Schering-Plough’s Claritin (loratadine) and HMR’s Allegra. At $20.9 million and $19.3 million, respectively, Claritin and Allegra. At $20.9 million and $19.3 million, respectively, Claritin and Allegra were the top beneficiaries of ad dollars for Rx DTC products between August 1997 and March 1998, and their ads were in the top three most often recalled by consumers in the past three months (along with Astra Merck’s heartburn medication, Prilosec (omeprazole), at $10.7 million).

Earlier this year, Scott-Levin reported that half of all US promotional spending by pharmaceutical companies on DTC advertising in the first two months of 1998 went to TV advertising, or nearly double the percentage in all of 1997 (Scrip No 2342, p15). In the first quarter of 1998, the percentage devoted to TV advertising was 47%, compared with 46% for magazines, 6% for newspapers, and 2% for radio, according to the latest Scott-Levin audit.

…disease class
By disease class, spending was highest on ads for allergy medications in both 1997 ($139.5 million) and January-April 1998 ($99.1 million), according to Gay Kassan, marketing development director for Time Inc. But anticholestrol drug ads ($65 milion in 1997, $64.8 million in 1Q 1998) are overtaking those for antihypertensives ($65.5 million in 1997, $64.8 million in 1Q 1998) are overtaking those for antihypertensives ($65.5 million in 1997, $35.2 million in 1Q 1998) to reach second place. The top ad spending categories in 1997 were as follows:

Category Ad Spend
allergy $139.5 million
antihypertensives $65.5 million
anticholestrol $65 million
antifungal $46 million
ulcer/reflux $42.6 million
asthma $41 million
migraine $33.3 million
contraceptives $27.4 million
antidepressants $26.5 million
antibiotics $21.1 million
smoking cessation $18.6 million
skin products $17.9 million
arthritis $17.7 million
diabetes $16.2 million

From January-April 1998, the therapeutic categories with the highest spending were migraine ($23.9 million), smoking ($22.5 million), ulcer/reflux ($21.2 million), asthma $16.8 million, skin ($10.6 million), antifungal ($8.4 million), antibiotics ($6.7 million), diabetes $531,000) and arthritis ($329,000).