Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14622

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

Goldstein J.
Google Explains Why Drug Companies Fear the Web
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2008 Nov 12
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/11/12/google-explains-why-drug-companies-fear-the-web/

Full text:

Drug companies spend only about 4% of their ad budgets online – far less than their counterparts in other industries, the Health Blog learned yesterday on a field trip to Google’s New York outpost.

The company hosted an afternoon workshop for drug company marketing folks. We sat in on a bit of the action and chatted with Mary Ann Belliveau, who oversees Google’s ad sales to the drug industry.

Why the reluctance to spend money online? A big part of the answer seems to lie with the FDA. The group at the agency that watches over drug advertising and marketing has never issued written rules to govern advertising drugs on the Internet. So drug companies are more comfortable sticking with print and TV, where the rules are clearer, Belliveau said.

Still, the industry is coming along. Five years ago, a large pharma company would typically come to Google and say, “We need to own these 20″ search terms, Belliveau told us. Now the companies are starting to come up with Web sites and online ad buys to capture consumers at every step of the disease process.

That broader approach seems more in tune with the way people use the Web. A patient might go to the Internet when she thinks she may have a disease; after she goes to the doctor to find out what’s going on; when she learns she’ll be taking a drug; and when she thinks she’s having side effects from the drug. What savvy drug marketer wouldn’t want to be there every step of the way? And it’s good news for Google, which is in the business of selling online ads after all.