Big Pharma Wants to 'Friend' You

Direct-to-Consumer Advertising:

Big Pharma Wants to 'Friend' You

Drug makers are using social media to market products in ways that the brand affiliation is not always obvious

Adriana Barton
(The Globe and Mail, Toronto, July 25, 2011)

"According to a formal complaint submitted in November to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission [FTC]…by four separate watchdog groups…pharmaceutical marketing on the Web…'threatens consumer privacy and engages in unfair and deceptive practices'...the British Medical Journal cited the report in an article that suggests Big Pharma’s online marketing activities pose a threat to public health.

Direct-to-consumer advertising that includes the name of a prescription drug, health claim and contraindications is prohibited in Canada and highly regulated in the United States. But transparency has become murky on the Internet, says Jeff Chester, co-author of the complaint to the FTC and executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Digital Democracy…

The pharmaceutical industry’s growing presence online coincides with a pivotal shift in health care…As many as 80 per cent of Internet users go online to find health information, according to a 2011 report published by the non-profit Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. And almost 20 per cent go online to find others with similar health problems. Big Pharma is gearing up to 'friend' and 'tweet' them…

According to a 2010 report in Pharma Marketing News, there may be hundreds of patients in social networks earning thousands of dollars from drug companies to provide 'real patient stories' as part of online branded drug or disease-awareness campaigns.

The article describes these 'online opinion leaders' as [the social media marketing]…'secret sauce' [for Big Pharma]…And unless drug companies comply with FTC regulations, consumers have no way of knowing which online 'friends' are on the payroll…Pharmaceutical companies…argue that social media provides an important channel…[With regard to one drug company’s social media forays]

The U.S. Federal Drug Administration [FDA] ruled the Facebook widget provided 'misleading' shared content because it failed to disclose serious risks associated with the drug…[overall] brand recognition plays a major role in doctors’ offices, points out Barbara Mintzes, a specialist in direct-to-consumer advertising at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Health Services and Policy Research.

Her research and a 2005 study by Richard Kravitz at the University of California suggest that when patients ask for a medication by name, they have a 50- to 75-per-cent chance of walking out of the doctor’s office with a prescription for that drug -- often despite physicians’ ambivalence about the treatment choice."

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