HEADLINE: THE MEDIA BUSINESS:
ADVERTISING; Pharmaceutical makers and ad agencies fight to preserve
campaigns for prescription drugs.
BYLINE:
By Stuart Elliott
BODY: MADISON AVENUE, facing growing legislative threats to one of the
advertising industry's most lucrative categories, is stepping up the fight to
protect its freedom to pitch prescription drugs directly to consumers.
Drug companies, agencies and their media allies who have
benefited handsomely from the flood of ads beat back one recent measure in the
House of Representatives. But advocacy organizations on the other side of the
issue vow to continue battling to limit or even eliminate such campaigns, and
one senator has introduced legislation that would limit the pharmaceutical
industry's tax deduction for such advertising.
The
category of direct-to-consumer ads did not even exist until five years ago.
Before 1997, broad curbs prevented pharmaceutical makers from mounting any
significant efforts, and they aimed most of their spending directly at health
care professionals.
But since the Food and Drug
Administration loosened its strictures against those ads, primarily by making it
much easier to promote drugs with commercials, the category has boomed. It has
become an estimated $2.5-billion-a-year business for the media. That exceeds the
amount spent annually to advertise many drugs sold over the counter like
analgesics and vitamins, according to CMR, a division of Taylor Nelson Sofres
that tracks ad spending.
The spending for the
direct-to-consumer drug campaigns, which come complete with the traditional
trappings of brand advertising like celebrity endorsers, jingles, free samples
and slogans, also exceeds the yearly outlays in mainstay marketing categories
like insurance and real estate, apparel and alcoholic beverages.
Agencies are anxious to keep that revenue flowing as they struggle to
recover from the worst advertising recession in decades. They and their clients,
the drug companies, are also eager to keep open a channel that has significantly
stimulated demand and sales.
Indeed, in a survey last
month by the Ipsos-NPD division of Ipsos, a marketing research company, 25
percent of respondents said they had been prompted by direct-to-consumer ads to
call or visit a doctor to discuss the product being advertised. Moreover, 15
percent of respondents reported requesting the very drug that was the subject of
the ad.
That is one reason opponents castigate
direct-to-consumer ads, decrying them as unfairly influencing important health
care decisions about powerful medicines that ought not to be sold with the same
sophisticated marketing ploys used to peddle movies, soft drinks or fast
food.
"The stuff done to promote drugs works, and
because it works, it's doing a disservice to the patient," said Sidney Wolfe,
director for the health research group of Public Citizen, an advocacy
organization in Washington. "The doctors are frequently as misled as the
patients are," he added.
One doctor, J. Edward Hill --
the new chairman of the American Medical Association in Chicago -- offered
another complaint. "We have no policy that opposes direct-to-consumer
advertising, mainly because of freedom-of-speech issues," Dr. Hill said.
"However, we do have some big concerns about advertising getting in the middle
of the patient-physician relationship.
"It's sometimes
even creating an adversarial relationship," he added, "when the patient insists
on an advertised medicine but the doctor believes it's not the best or most
effective medicine."
Dr. Hill called on the Food and
Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry to finance "research that
would definitely tell us whether this improves the quality of care enough to
make it worth the increased costs of the medicines being advertised."
A bill before the House of Representatives, to provide a
Medicare prescription-drug benefit to the elderly, had
included a provision directing the General Accounting Office, the investigative
arm of Congress, to conduct such a study. But by the time the House passed the
bill on June 28 and sent it to the Senate, the provision had been deleted.
"The bill is absolutely devoid of anything to do with
advertising," said Dick O'Brien, executive vice president of the American
Association of Advertising Agencies and director for the Washington office, who
has led the Madison Avenue effort.
"It was serious,
really serious," Mr. O'Brien said of the attempt by the critics to urge limits
on direct-to-consumer campaigns. "We had to go into overdrive to explain that
the role advertising plays is really a very beneficial one," centered on
"empowering consumers to talk with their doctors as equals and opening
discussions that otherwise would not have taken place."
The agencies are being joined by lobbyists for media that would lose ad
revenue if Congress tightened rules for direct-to-consumer ads. At one time,
some magazine and newspaper publishers perceived television and radio as rivals
for ad revenue from makers of prescription drugs, but the media are now working
together.
"This is certainly the one issue we're
looking at right now," said Rita Cohen, senior vice president for legislative
and regulatory policy of the Magazine Publishers of America.
"We have to be diligent about all potential Congressional action that
might be negative," she added. "So we've been visiting the key people on Capitol
Hill and showing them ads from magazines, letting the ads talk for themselves,
so they can understand the benefits of advertising."
Another charge raised by opponents is that most of the prescription
drugs promoted directly to consumers in magazines, on television and elsewhere
are the newest, most expensive products and thus offer their makers the most
profits.
"American taxpayers should not have to
subsidize excessive advertising that only leads to higher prices at the pharmacy
counter," said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan. She recently
proposed that the tax deductions taken by drug makers for advertising -- which
is currently a fully deductible business expense -- cannot exceed the tax
deductions they take for research and development. Senator Stabenow is seeking
to have her Fair Advertising and Increased Research Act become part of the
Senate version of the bill the House passed last month.
"She is very well meaning, but this raises very serious issues," said
Dan Jaffe, the executive vice president of the Association of National
Advertisers who runs the Washington office of the organization, which represents
the nation's marketers. "It would create an enormous precedent way beyond
prescription drugs, affecting research on energy conservation by oil companies,
fuel efficiency by automakers, health benefits by food companies.
"The advertising community and the media community worked
very hard on the House side" to assure there would be no advertising limits in
the bill passed there, he said.
"We need to work very
hard on the Senate side," he said. "This is an issue that will not go away."
http://www.nytimes.com
GRAPHIC: Photo: Direct-to-consumer campaigns like these, for the
drugs Procrit, Sustiva and Kaletra, did not even exist five years ago but have
since boomed.
Chart: "Prescription Push" By one count, advertisers now spend more money promoting prescription
medicine than they do for over-the-counter drugs.
Graph shows the advertising spending for drugs (Prescription, Non
prescription) since 1999.
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