Business briefs/leads. I smell opportunity here, since Pharmaceuticals have quite a lot of their obscene profits earmarked for marketing, if they stop throwing it down the sinkhole of television, alternative media vendors will benefit. Screw TV anyway.
Pharma Reformulates Marketing Plans :
Pharma to TV: Drop dead.
That, in a nutshell, was the message from drug companies last week as Bristol-Myers Squibb said it would cease consumer advertising for all new brands during their first year on the market. Overall, pharmaceutical marketers were wondering whether TV was worth the price for any drug advertising.
...The Eye for Pharma Marketing ROI conference in Philadelphia revealed that while BMS may be the first to step out of the closet, most pharma companies are becoming increasingly disenchanted with TV advertising and are moving more dollars into alternatives, particularly the Internet. Their mantra: Move away from direct-to-consumer marketing and head toward direct-to-patient marketing. DTP focuses more on grabbing the attention of people who are already being treated by doctors, as opposed to DTC's scatter-shot appeal to the entire population.BMS spent $35 million of its $61 million ad spend on TV last year, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus. And despite the hand-wringing, first quarter ad spend is down only $27 million for the entire category, to $986 million.
On June 14, the company agreed to pay $300 million to settle federal “channel stuffing” allegations, and two former BMS execs were indicted for allegedly organizing the effort to inflate sales figures by inducing retailers to take more product than they needed. The next day, the Food & Drug Administration ordered all pharmaceutical companies to re-label all pain relief products containing ibuprofen and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatories with warnings on stomach bleeding. Brands affected include Advil (Wyeth), Motrin (McNeil) and Midol (Bayer). “It's a tumultuous time,” said David Stern, vp-marketing at Serono, Rockland, Mass. “The return on investment for traditional advertising is really waning . . . the Web is where we can get a return on our investment.”
{Business}
