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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14425

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: news

Silverman E.
Pharma Spending On Unbranded Ads Is Falling
Pharmalot 2008 Sep 29
http://www.pharmalot.com/2008/09/pharma-spending-on-unbranded-ads-is-falling/


Full text:

The money spent on advertising is in decline for the first time ever, and this has caused a dramatic collapse in unbranded health education campaigns. You know, those are the ads that describe an illness without mentioning a med. Spending in this year’s first half on unbranded plugs fell 3 percent to $2.4 billion, according to BrandWeek, citing Nielsen Monitor-Plus data.
The decline was expected, but the numbers mask a surprise: Unbranded campaigns have been cut by more than half in the last two years, the mag writes. In 2006, drugmakers spent $660 million on health education and corporate image ads. In 2007, they spent $341 million. In the first half of this year, spending was $138 million, a 22 percent dive. Unbranded spending on the Internet has also declined.
The drop is unexpected for two reasons, the mag writes. One, big pharma signed a pledge in 2005 to make its ads more educational. Two, unbranded campaigns don’t require drugmakers to list all risks and side effects. Although Pfizer may be an exception with its Chantix ads.
Unbranded ads, designed to grow the category as a whole, are less closely tied to sales because consumers may walk out of the pharmacy with a competitor’s product, according to Matt Giegerich, ceo at the CommonHealth agency.
And Jay Carter, sr vp and director of client services at AbelsonTaylor in Chicago, which handles Abbott and Lilly ads, tells the mag that unbranded campaigns are becoming a luxury firms can’t afford. “The reason why” budgets are down, he says, “is there’s a lot of competition and unbranded doesn’t work in a competitive environment.”

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909