Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17091

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

Arnold M
TV viewers suffer risk info overload from pharma ads
Medical Marketing & Media 2009 Dec 16
http://www.mmm-online.com/tv-viewers-suffer-risk-info-overload-from-pharma-ads/article/160480/

Full text:

Consumers tend to block out risk info in TV and print ads for prescription drugs-particularly those over age 55-according to a study by ORC Guideline.
The research firm found that 41% of US consumers pay little or no attention to risk info presented by pharma companies in their TV commercials, and half did the same for disclosures in print ads. Respondents over the age of 55 were particularly likely to tune out risk info.

ORC Guideline’s chief research officer, Morris Whitcup, said risk info overload is probably to blame.
The online survey of 1,045 US adults was conducted October 29-30.

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963