A little item you may have missed from the AP last week:
"Pharmaceutical companies increased advertising spending by 9% in the first half of this year, suggesting they no longer feel constrained by complaints raised after the landmark withdrawal of the pain medicine Vioxx.
Spending rose to $2.46 billion in the six-month period as drug makers devoted larger portions of their budgets to magazine ads and poured more funds into campaigns to promote their images and disease awareness, according to TNS Media Intelligence. In the first six months of 2005, spending was essentially flat at $2.26 billion.
The Vioxx withdrawal in late 2004 cast a pall over pharmaceutical advertising as critics claimed drug makers' splashy campaigns minimized medicines' risks. Vioxx was a heavily advertised Merck & Co. pain reliever that was found to increase patients' risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Earlier this year, the pharmaceutical industry adopted voluntary guidelines to improve the accuracy and balance of ads so the severity of drugs' side effects aren't whitewashed. That is easier to accomplish in magazine ads so drug makers are using that medium more frequently, Jon Swallen, research director at TNS."
That last comment is a bit deceiving. Pharma may be using magazines more frequently, but they're still spending "only " a third of their money in that medium. TV - where the side effect whitewashing can still occur more easily - still gets the lion's share of the spending - 59%.
Posted by schwitz at October 10, 2006 07:25 AM | TrackBack