With pipelines drying up drug companies turn to schools for help

May/11/2008 08:06 Filed in: Pharma Business

From this weeks Business Week Magazine:

On a rainy Friday in early May, two scientists from vastly different worlds met at a bar near Boston's Fenway Park to talk business. One was Dr. Stephen Friend, a top cancer executive at struggling drugmaker Merck. The other was Dr. Ronald DePinho, a professor of medicine at Harvard University. The topic: a new alliance Merck and Harvard have formed in the war against cancer. This is nothing like past partnerships between industry and academia, in which drugmakers helped fund discoveries at the university but relied on their own teams to come up with commercial products. In this case, Merck expects its Harvard allies to stay involved throughout the drug development process. "We're creating a larger discovery enterprise," says DePinho. Read More...

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Working at Eli Lilly & Company

May/10/2008 07:35 Filed in: Working in pharma

This past week I was asked if I liked working at Eli Lilly and although there are some things that I did not agree with at Lilly the answer to that questions has to be a resounding "yes". I was lucky enough to work with some very talented people at Lilly including a DTC manager who was extremely talented in marketing and a Director who had a consumer marketing background. However, I am passionate about the Internet as a tool to empower patients and as thus never felt that Lilly was doing enough to leverage the Web. Read More...

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Cymbalta DTC spot shows how good DTC can be

May/03/2008 10:31 Filed in: Current DTC

I have to say that of all the DTC ads on TV right now the one I like the best is the "Depression Hurts" campaign for Cymbalta. I like it because it shows what depression can feel like and how it can effect others. This is what DTC should and can do, show what it's like to suffer through some of these conditions so that people can seek help via an informed decision with their HCP's. Read More...

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What's really important? Patients of course

May/02/2008 06:49 Filed in: Pharma Business

Perhaps no industry is facing as many challenges as the pharmaceutical industry right now. The combination of blockbusters coming off patent, record increases in healthcare costs as more boomers retire and increased FDA scrutinization of drugs is leading to an environment that is hostile. Yet this author believes that the change in the business environment will make companies stronger and better positioned to compete in the future. Read More...

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The storm approaches....

May/01/2008 05:42 Filed in: Pharma Business

When it comes to business you have two options: change or perish. Pfizer, with the failure of a successor for Lipitor, is streamlining management and reducing bureaucracy to be more competitive. GSK has hired an ex-Lilly executive to manager their European operations and is also reducing the layers of management. In the end these changes will make pharma more competitive but in addition to organizational changes they need to focus more on patients and less on Wall Street. Read More...

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ROI analysis is an oxymoron when it come to mass media & pharma

Apr/29/2008 03:12 Filed in: DTC Environment

It never fails..DTC marketers get up in front of other DTC marketer and present Power Point slides on how their programs provided for a positive ROI. They get applause from the audience and then the next person gets up and presents more data that, in all likelihood, does not tell the story and continues to ignore the fact that mass media is dead and consumers now have all the power. Read More...

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Physicians sound off in market research

Apr/29/2008 05:39 Filed in: HCP Marketing

Anytime you conduct qualitative research with physicians you are sure to hear a lot but I wasn't ready for the candid remarks I heard from physicians during a full day of research. While they all agreed that the Web is empowering patients the misinformation and the self diagnosing that is going on is becoming troublesome to many and they wonder how many physicians would just write a script rather than go through the diagnostic criteria needed to establish a diagnosis.

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First there was ED now is pharma trying to convince people they hace UC?

Apr/26/2008 09:11 Filed in: Current DTC

In my early morning surfing of bookmarked Websites I was surprised to see an online ad for Lialda from Shire. Lialda is Shire's product to treat ulcerative colitis a condition that effects 700,000 people in the US. With such a small target market one would have to wonder what in the hell this ad would be doing on the NY Post Page Six page ? I guess that maybe they used demographic targeting since UC starts in people aged 15-30 and is five times more likely to effect people of Eastern European Jewish decent but this ad could surely do better somewhere else. Read More...

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Regardless of polls spending on "e" by pharma will be anemic

Apr/25/2008 05:34 Filed in: Internet & DTC Marketing

I don't care what the surveys say, spending by pharma for anything online will be down and down substantially. Yesterday Web MD announced that their projected earnings will be down and I am hearing that agencies have already started to lay off people. While pharma would like to believe they are spending more online their anemic planned spending is an indication of just how far behind the times pharma marketers really are. Read More...

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The Recession Will Dramatically Change the Way and the Reasons Why Your Target Buys -- in Many Cases, Permanently

Apr/23/2008 10:53 Filed in: Marketing Environment

From today's Ad Age comes a timely article on consumer behavior. In summary customers' behavior is changing right under our noses and when the economy bounces back, you might find that what motivates consumers to choose or not choose your brand has changed. The life of a consumer can change in an instant, often with just a few words, such as "I do" or "You're fired," or the cry of a newborn baby. These change points -- when almost everything in our lives shifts -- drive us to change our behavior and embrace new brand relationships. For marketers, these change points are opportunities to forge new relationships that could last a lifetime. Read More...

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Pfizer gets warning letter for technical glitch on CNN.com

Apr/22/2008 06:21 Filed in: Internet & DTC Marketing

Well the FDA is watching the Web folks. It seems, according to Pfizer, that a technical glitch (translation someone forgot something like a line of code) prevented a recent online Viagra ad from displaying fair balance information. The FDA caught it and issued a warning letter to Pfizer but one has to wonder how this could have happened with the checks and controls of a good ad web server environment ? Read More...

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Online still woefully underfunded in pharma

Apr/22/2008 05:36 Filed in: Current DTC Internet & DTC Marketing

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? Read More...

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