corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17826

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

Iskowitz M
Quantifying pharma's online promotional shift
Medical Marketing & Media 2010 May 11
http://www.mmm-online.com/quantifying-pharmas-online-promotional-shift/article/169948/


Full text:

Pharma brands quickened their shift toward online consumer media last year but continued to invest more on web-based professional outreach, new data show.

The breakdown is noteworthy, showing that the industry’s online investment, so far, is more heavily tilted toward reaching physicians than patients. Still uncertain is whether, and to what extent, pharma is growing its web presence at the expense of print, because budgets tend to fluctuate at the individual brand level.

“It’s hard to know whether the overall budget is increasing or decreasing, but it’s quite clear that [spend] is a lot more diversified in that it’s moving more away from print-not deleting print but diversifying-to include more digital and more emerging technologies,” said Fred Foard, EVP, strategic insights, at media planning firm CMI, whose sister company, Compas, is the largest media buyer of prescription drug advertising for professional healthcare audiences.

In absolute dollars, spending on web-based DTC promotion-banner ads and other sponsorships, but not search-more than doubled, with a 138% rise to $315 million, from $132 million in 2008, according to Kantar Health data cited by SDI. The figure has more than tripled since 2007, up 259%. Internet media outlay as a percentage of total DTC spend also saw a more than twofold rise, now accounting for 6.6%, up from 2.9% the previous year.

“[Online DTC media] is still a small percentage, but it’s growing the fastest,” in comparison to physician-facing online media, said Kelly Sborlini, VP of market research audits at SDI.

SDI says its ePromotion Audit, which tracks eDetails, online meetings and other web-based promotional activities for physicians, showed an increase of nearly 7% in industry spending on ePromotion, from $491 million in 2008 to $523 million in 2009. In terms of overall share, ePromotion commands 2.5% of total promotion (details, events, DTC, journals and ePromotion), vs. 2.4% in 2008.

The storyline regarding print media, of course, is less rosy. In 2009 industry’s year-over-year spend posted significant decreases on each of the consumer and physician sides. Medical-surgical journal ad spend, hemorrhaging the last few years, continued its decline in 2009. At $287 million, spending on such ads dipped 19%, from $354 million in 2008, following a 25% skid, from $474 million, the year before. DTC magazine expenditures fell 7% from 2008 and 26% from 2007.

Are brands cannibalizing resources from traditional channels to feed their internet ventures? “We can’t make a direct correlation that dollars spent on journals are going to ePromotion or internet advertising, because we don’t track it at the branded decision-maker level,” Sborlini said.

Asked to speculate whether he sees a one-to-one shift taking place, CMI’s Foard said, “I can’t answer that, because as I look across the brands we deal with, it has more to do with what’s going on with the brand than the media mix. Some brands may be increasing or decreasing spend. It has to do with what they’re trying to accomplish within their lifecycle.”

As to why doctor-facing ePromotion seems to be outdrawing the consumer-oriented kind, Foard said he has seen clients pulling back on consumer spend and pouring more dollars into professional advertising.

“I could speculate that [clients] have found the consumer strategy didn’t provide as much return on investment as they had hoped for; [and] in the meantime, they’ve lost share to competitors who continue to promote to the professional side,” he said. “Or maybe it’s just the realization that you can create demand on the consumer side, but if you fail to create adoption on the professional side, it’s all for naught.”

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








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