Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16795

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

Steel E
Drug Makers to Press for Guidance on Web Marketing
The Wall Street Journal 2009 Nov 12B4
http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091112/drug-makers-to-press-for-guidance-on-web-marketing/

Abstract:

Internet Companies Also Will Attend FDA Hearing Thursday on Adapting Disclosure Rules to New Media

Full text:

Eager to expand use of the Web to advertise their products, pharmaceutical giants, including Eli Lilly and Pfizer, are heading to Washington this week to call on the Food and Drug Administration to provide guidelines for marketing prescription drugs online.

Drug companies are dabbling with Internet advertising, but their efforts have been minimal. Most of their online ads promote broader health or corporate initiatives, rather than individual medicines. That’s chiefly due to industry fears of running afoul of regulators.

Seeking a bigger piece of one of the country’s largest ad categories, Web companies, including Google, Yahoo and WebMD Health, are expected to join the drug industry at a hearing Thursday at the FDA, which has been scrutinizing drug makers’ digital marketing efforts.

For the past several years, pharmaceutical advertising has been one of the few cash cows remaining for traditional media like television and magazines. Drug companies spent $4.4 billion on ads for prescription drugs last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, an ad-tracking firm owned by WPP.

Internet companies such as Google have missed out on most of those ad dollars despite the average of 91 million Americans who seek health information online each month, according to comScore. Pharmaceutical companies spent just $130 million to advertise prescription drugs on the Web last year, TNS says. The Internet ad figures only account for spending on display ads, the graphical ads that run alongside content on a Web page.

“The first place that consumers turn when they have a health question today is the Internet. Yet pharmaceutical companies still spend the vast majority of their marketing in traditional media,” says Wayne Gattinella, chief executive at WebMD.

The FDA has established strict rules for drug advertising. Among other requirements, ads that mention the brand name of a prescription drug must also include disclosures, such as the condition the drug is intended to treat and potential side effects. The FDA hasn’t set specific standards for online marketing.

The agency has said existing regulations can address many aspects of advertising on the Web, but that other aspects, such as search marketing and social media, could warrant additional guidance.

An FDA spokeswoman declined to comment on the agency’s plans, noting that the purpose of Thursday’s hearing is to gather information.

Industry executives say lack of FDA guidance about how to apply existing drug-marketing rules to new media has been a stumbling block. “Clearly when you look at the number of people on Twitter and Facebook, there is no doubt how people want to communicate,” says Ray Kerins, vice president of world-wide communications at Pfizer. “This is a new medium, and we need guidelines so that we can educate patients and physicians in a safe and appropriate way.”

Of course, calling for more regulation could backfire and greatly limit the scope of drug marketing online.

The FDA hearings are set to focus in part on how drug marketers should make required disclosures about their products within in the time and space confines of the Web.

Marketers have grown especially cautious about Web advertising since March, when the FDA sent letters to 14 companies, telling them that their search ads needed to include risk information about their drugs in the text of the ads. Several drug makers pulled their search ads for a period and recently started testing ways to include adequate disclosures.

Eli Lilly, one of the companies that received such a letter, says it now buys search ads that refer to just the brand name of a medicine, instead of its name and the condition it treats.

A search for erectile dysfunction drug Cialis, for example, might elicit an ad with a link to www.cialis.com, which includes disclosures, and text that reads “Official Site. Free Trial Voucher.”

Lilly also buys ads that refer to specific diseases without mentioning a treatment. A search for “depression,” for instance, might bring up an ad with text that reads “Depression Questions?” and includes a link to Lilly.com/Depression.

The company says it is trying to figure out how to advertise medicines for which the FDA requires prominent safety warnings, such as Cymbalta, which is used to treat depression.

Some Internet companies and trade groups are proposing new formats for online ads. Google is pitching a design for its search ads that include an extra line for disclosures. For example, a search for “Yaz birth control” would reveal an ad with a link to the official site for the drug as well as a separate line that says “click to see full safety and prescribing information, including boxed warning.” Yahoo is testing a new format for display ads that would include a link inside the ad for safety information.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group representing pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, is recommending that the FDA sanction a special logo for ads and Web sites that would indicate FDA-regulated risk information.

“It would be helpful to have some clear guidance that these practices are acceptable. We’re not getting the clarity in the marketplace that we would like to get,” says David Zinman, vice president and general manager of display advertising at Yahoo.

Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google’s YouTube, raise other questions for drug advertising.

The FDA is exploring whether pharmaceutical brands should be held responsible for consumer-created content that mentions their brands, if pharmaceutical brands should be held accountable for false information about their products online and how they should be held responsible for monitoring adverse events related to their products.