Online still woefully underfunded in pharma

Apr/22/2008 05:36 Filed in: Current DTC Internet & DTC Marketing
images
Pharmaceutical companies need to adjust to the current realties of their customers and adapt quickly. Challenges currently facing traditional sales and marketing media include tightening pricing and reimbursement controls, increasing pressures on physician time, and public skepticism of the Pharma industry all compounded by a tightening regulatory framework. So reads the executive summary in a report from Datamonitor. So if this has been a long time coming why is pharma still in a funk?




Datamonitor hit the nail right on the head with their report on eHealth Insights for the pharma industry. Since speed of implementation is a competitive advantage one would have to wonder when the lights are going to go on inside pharma marketers heads? One reader recently posted a comment that "the reason for pharma not embracing new media is not because of ROI but because of the legal issues involved". That myopic thinking is one of the primary reasons that pharma marketers are stuck in the past and refuse to embrace online media.

1


According to another report from eMarketer, pharma is planning to increase spending online but in a puzzle the increase in spending for online still only represents 5% of the total budget? This means that either marketers are expecting DTC budgets to increase (not likely but with new products this is a possibility) and that the Web will never receive enough money for pharma to truly explore new media options. By the way those marketers that do extremely well on the Web were spending 20% of their budgets online and some are now going to expand that number to 40-50% of dollars allocated for online.


In planned changes for spending in pharma websites the number one planned increase is Web sites. Well if done correctly a branded and unbranded Website could cost $2-$3 million including research and user testing. The next line item, search engine keywords, is probably the area where pharma wastes more and more money. Like I have written here before clicks don't mean a thing to me it is "cost per targeted action" as too many people will click come to your home page and leave on your home page.


Planned Changes


Now I don't want to say that the study from Cegedim Dendrite is flawed but they obviously have a self interest in seeing online budgets go up. They may have also interviewed people who do not control the flow of dollars as most of the people I talked to in eMarketing have told me that they are looking at stagnant budgets for 2008. As for me I'll believe the increases when I see them but 5% of a total budget leaves the web woefully underfunded.
|