Pretzel Logic
Jul/28/2008 07:18
I was shocked to hear, awhile back, an executive of my former company say “I don’t believe in DTC advertising”. Unfortunately there are a hell of a lot of people in the pharmaceutical and medical device industry who do not believe in DTC advertising and if they don’t believe in DTC ads then why the hell should they believe in the Internet as a strategic channel to meet business objectives?
According to the information in the presentation that I saw most senior managers do NOT believe the Internet is a viable strategic channel to increase business and eMarketing people are spending more time trying to get dollars for programs than actually executing programs online. In addition, in my opinion, DTC managers are busy in endless meetings trying to get more money for DTC and continually have to justify requests for dollars and programs. This can quickly lead to burn out and, when you do get the go ahead to spend money, a sense of major accomplishment and as such little time is actually spent on the creative aspect of DTC campaigns.
It basically comes down to how people within the organization view marketing. Some view it as an expense while others see it as a cornerstone to build brand equity. Right now pharma is interested in one thing and one thing only and that is to increase sales. How else do you explain the continued hiring of sales people and the intent to cut people (from marketing) even though sales are up. Pharma wants to keep “the Street” happy and to do this they have to cut expenses. However the continued underinvestment of eMarketing at a time of decreased budgets defies logic.
You give me a budget of $2, $3 or $5 million dollars and I will drive people to a site and present analytics that show the lift in intent to ask physicians for a product as a result of coming to our site ! That is a small drop in the bucket when DTC managers spend $50-$75 million on ineffective TV ads.
A friend of mine whom I respect very much has been on pharma eMarketing for over 7 years now and informed me that he has decided to “move on”. When we talked some more he said that he was just sick and tired of presenting a “case for the Web” and showing success and then not getting dollars. The truth is that this happens WAY too often and eMarketing people become experts at using Power Point to continually redo presentations. When an online ad campaign I launched had an ROI of over 5:1 I asked for more dollars to continue the program but was told “we don’t have the money”. Then the next day we were all told that since sales are down budgets would be cut again. Pretzel logic continues to rule in pharma and medical devices today....
|