Seed Newsvine
Quote of the decade
May/26/2008 05:40 Filed in: DTC
Environment
DTC marketers spend way too much money intruding in peoples lives. The problem is that once they have the attention of consumers they don't know how to engage them in personal dialogue for fear of upsetting in house stodgy lawyers. Agencies come up with suggestions to really make an impact and all too often they run into the dark room of executives within pharma who only know that they need to support a sales force that is becoming less and less effective.
George Parker once said "never has so much money been spent on so much shit for the benefit of so few people". Why engage people when we can conduct a DTC campaign for $40 or $50 million and hope that some of the spots are relevant to our audience? Leo Clow the Chairman and Creative Director of TBWA Worldwide said that "one of the realities of the advertising business is that 90% of the work is terrible". In DTC that might be 99.1% of the work.
DTC will evolve into a new model or it will continue to be questioned by senior executives who don't have marketing backgrounds. DTC managers can no longer throw words like reach and frequency and cost per thousand at executive hoping for more money based on confusion. It won't work that way anymore and if the DTC industry continues on the current path in the next few years they will become even more irrelevant and a lot of DTC people will be looking for work.
We, people in DTC marketing, have an obligation to leave our companies in better shape than when we first joined them. We can do this by impacting patient lives and focusing on less on ROI modeling and more on our customers. For when we take care of our customers and patients they will take care of us. It's a lesson that bears repeating over and over and one that I feel most DTC marketers have long forgotten.
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