Unbranded DTC advertising

Aug/29/2008 06:33

Direct-to-consumer drug advertising dropped nearly 30% in the first quarter of this year but now scrutiny may turn to unbranded ads according to an article this morning in the Wall Street Journal. "One night during the Olympic Games, NBC host Bob Costas noted that the 3 a.m. rerun of the primetime broadcast was sponsored by the maker of Ambien. "No lie," he said. "There's irony there somewhere." While the Ambien Rooster ad is a great approach for out of the box DTC advertising some other unbranded ads are simply an "end run" while the brand gets negative publicity.

While I was at Lilly I worked on the Sarafem launch team. Sarafem was for the treatment of PMDD and had the same active ingredients as Prozac. When the brand launched we launched an extensive unbranded campaign to raise awareness of PMDD as a treatable medical condition since research indicated that the awareness of was low among our target audience. Unbranded advertising can be a great way to raise awareness of medical conditions to your target audience and get them into physicians or have them go online to do more research about treatment options.

This month the first spots for the Ambien Rooster have been appearing and although I thought the creative could have been a little better I applaud the brand team as these spots are "out of the box" thinking and a great integrated online and offline campaign. I wish the same could be said about the Chantix unbranded spots which have been running ever since the media reports linking Chantix to suicides. Last time I checked the dictionary transparency did not mean hiding from the truth.

Now drug companies are in business to make money, and DTC marketing can help brands make money but since pharma disapproval rating is up there with oil and insurance companies one would think that they would go out of their way to stay in consumers good graces. This continued end around approach assumes that a majority of consumers are stupid and will not put 2 and 2 together but one has to wonder the rationale for running the spots. Did someone on the brand team ask "since we have so much negative publicity let's pull the branded ads and substitute the unbranded ads". If so than this is a clear indication that there are still a lot of bad marketing people out there who lack good judgement and have forgotten why we are in this business.