Another pat on the back for DTC Marketers
Trade magazines can be found in every industry and some actually can be a source of great information for marketers. DTC Perspective is not one of those magazines. While thumbing through the latest issue they featured a report on awards, that they sponsor, and everyone seemed to win either gold, silver or bronze awards. This is called good public relations to ensure that DTC marketers sign up for future seminars held by DTC Perspectives.
Let's look at DTC Company of the year..Sepracor for their Lunesta campaign. According to website hits (see below) Lunesta is far behind market leader Ambien and only slightly above the disastrous Rozarem. Correct me if I am wrong but the whole purpose of a DTC campaign is to gain market share? The Silver winner was Botox Cosmetics..I am not even going to go into why they should not be considered for DTC awards.
Ambien CR
is leaving Lunesta in the dust in website hits
and Rozarem doesn't
even register !
For sales over
$5 billion the award went to GSK for their work
on Boniva, Levitra and Avodart. This to me makes
some sense. The spots for Boniva with Sally
Fields are great and communicate the unique point
of difference (once a month vs every week).
However Levitra's campaign, with the causes of
ED, may have hit a niche in the market but have
failed to move the market share needle. The
Bronze award went to Amgen a real DTC powerhouse
and that alone should tell you just how bad these
award choices were.
These awards mean nothing but they do make
marketers feel good about themselves. They can go
back to their managers and say "look, we won" and
pat themselves on the back with the false sense
that they actually did something that added value
to their brands. However management is now
starting to dive deeper and deeper into the
marketing dollars spent on DTC. Want $40 million
for a new campaign? Tell me what it's going to do
for share and how we are going to measure it? Of
course there are a number of savvy marketers who
can manipulate data to show that what they spent
actually drove share.
It's a shame that some marketers actually
believe this hype and self promotion. This author
was part of the DTC team of they year a while
back for Cialis and I can tell you that the award
and $1.50 might get me a New York subway token.
There is a lot that is wrong with DTC today and
pharma companies are not willing to fix it. Less
than 1% of media, for example, is allocated to
the Internet at a time when premiere marketers
like P&G are allocating more dollars to the
Web and moving away from TV. When I receive an
issue of DTC Perspective I think next time it
will just go into the round file where it belongs
with all the other promotional materials. DTC
marketers need to stop looking for awards and
start looking at the sales numbers and patients
response to ads before they pat themselves on the
back for a job well done.