Would you spend $5billion and not have good measures of success?
This study on Value of DTC Ads in Pharma is fascinating and not a little scary.
Is it just me, or is anyone else horrified that companies would spend $5 billion and not have solid data as to whether their efforts were working? Where is the shareholder outrage? Why aren't Boards of Directors demanding accountability.? And why is it that companies cheerfully spend billions on advertising based on bad data, and yet won't properly fund PR measurement? What's wrong with this picture?
The answer is that the dinosaurs of advertising are measuring success based on eyeballs and contacts not on real results. Can we say "I told you so?"
As John Wannamaker famously said: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. And I dare say that a lot more than half of this five billion was wasted. But what of that portion
that was not wasted? The advertisers guarantee that the message will be delivered to the audience verbatim and in the correct context. How many PR's can do that? The trouble with PR is that it cannot control the message, and in today's digital age it can no longer even manage the message. PR professionals now have the challenge of engaging with stakeholders in an attempt to influence their thoughts and prompt them to write what they want them too. Not an easy challenge and one that many PR professionals are not up to, especially when trying to 'promote' new drugs. So when a company wants to promote a new product they have the choice of paying for PRs to attempt to get the message out or paying for advertisers to guarantee to get it out. Many companies cannot afford the latter but the super rich pharmaceuticals can, and with the stakes around block buster drugs being so high they cannot afford to wait around while PRs try.
Is it a good use of money? No. Am I surprised? No. Is this phenomenon anything new? No.
Posted by: Nic Byrne | September 09, 2008 at 01:16 PM
I have to admit, I'm a bit baffled by the study. They set the control group in French-speaking Canada, where so they wouldn't be as exposed to US advertising?
I've long wondered about DTC drug ads. They are trying to reach a targeted market: those affected by (whatever), and yet they use a mass medium? It's always struck me as an attempt to get more people to say "hey, that's me, I must need a pill!" and then allegedly they go to their doc and get diagnosed. This seems backwards--driving a demand for disease? Strange, and quite frankly unconscionable.
The only logical explanation is that they are somehow satisfied with a minor blip up in prescriptions, for that small hypochondriac segment of the population that does run to the doc and demand whatever magic pill is being advertised.
$5 billion, it seems to me, would go a long way in R&D...
Posted by: Jen Zingsheim | September 04, 2008 at 11:39 AM