With a shortage of blockbuster drugs in the pipeline and a deluge of prescription meds going off patent in the next few years, pharma has trimmed back its consumer advertising spend considerably, according to a recent report by TNS Media Intelligence. 

DTC ad spend for prescription drugs was down 3.6 percent in the first eight months of 2008, offsetting the 3.5 percent gain in 2007. The biggest hit appears to be in ad spend for new product launches. In the past three years, the top marketing launches set their respective companies back anywhere from $130 million (Vytorin, 2004) to $312 million (Lunesta, 2005). This year, not a single drug launch spent more than $100 million on marketing spend. Veramyst came the closest with $97.8 million, followed by Orcencia ($59.5 million) and Vyvanse ($52.6 million).

“I think it’s a reflection of the lack of a new drug pipeline,” said Jon Swallen, senior vice president for TNS Media Intelligence. “You go back a couple of years when new drugs like Lunesta and Ambien were coming to market, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in ad budgets-those were the good old days. Those kinds of mass market blockbuster drugs are not coming into the market.”

Meanwhile, television ad spend increased to 63.4 percent from 58.8 percent in 2007, while magazine spend dropped from 35.8 percent to 30.2 percent. All other forms of advertising accounted for only 6.4 percent of ad spend, including online advertising. 

“If you look over the past decade of DTC marketing, television and magazines have accounted for the lion share of spend,” Swallen said. “What’s significant about the current downturn in spending is that it’s coming out of the hide of magazines. This indicates to me that pharma CMOs think that television is a better ROI than print.”

TNS explained that the company does not currently track keyword ads, which is difficult to track on a sufficient scale, or salesforce marketing. 

The report noted a rising trend in pharma companies seeking new indications for existing drugs as a way of restarting the patent clock and to hedge against the lack of pipeline development.

Swallen however notes that ad spend does not necessarily increase to new launch levels for new indications, but instead, spend correlates more with how much time has past since the drug was last advertised. For example, Requip, which was approved for Parkinson’s in the ‘90s was recently was approved for restless leg syndrome. Since many years have past sine the initial launch, GSK pounded consumers with an ad campaign worthy of a new launch.

Drugs with new indications approved only a few years after launch would necessitate far less ad spend, Swallen said.

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Spending on television advertising might be on the rise, but the consumer ad spend for prescription drugs is seeing a downward trend.

Consumer Advertising Spend Drops as New Drugs Dwindle

When you’re building a Web presence for your brand, you need to keep customers’ preferences in mind. For example, if you were creating a branded site for physicians, how would the following statistics (from the online reference developer  

70      percent of doctors go online for clinical information at least once a day 

75      percent prefer to visit drug-specific sites rather than use search engines

Nearly      50 percent say they prefer to access the Web while meeting with patients,      instead of before or after hours.

Starting with this focus on drug-centered, practice-oriented information, you might well end up with a site like 

, launched last week by Centocor, the biologics arm of Johnson & Johnson. The site is an interesting hybrid-a branded site that looks in many ways like an unbranded site, designed to provide physicians with easy-to-digest information about Centocor’s Remicade (infliximab), which they can use to better communicate with their patients.

The key to the site’s appeal is its simplicity. While Medversation provides thousands of pages of information and citations, the home page is stripped down to a handful of categories. At the top of the page are links that take physicians to well-designed sequences on the natural history of Remicade’s indications (Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcerative colitis), plus sections on the risks of remicade, the benefits, and a risk/benefit analysis. Lower down are links for experienced users that lead to patient-friendly material, a library feature that lets doctors assemble customized brochures and handouts to share with patients, and a search engine for Remicade prescribing information. 

“Informed conversations between healthcare providers and their patients are essential to making the best therapeutic decisions at the end of the day,” said Tom Schaible, vice president of medical affairs at Centocor. “We believe that-even if it the doctor doesn’t end up using Remicade in a given patient.”

Remicade has been on the market for nearly 10 years, and Centocor has used some pretty innovative marketing strategies to inform people about the drug. Two years ago, the company released a full-length film, 

, which followed the day-to-day lives of actual patients as they learned to live with their diseases. 

“We continually look for unique ways to bring awareness of these diseases to patients and physicians,” Schaible said. “The diseases we treat are diseases that result from dysfunction of the immune system. They can be complicated by nature, and if they are not treated properly can have significant, irreversible outcomes.”

Centocor is now training its medical affairs team and reps to introduce physicians to the site. “When you think about a drug like Remicade, you have to really take risk and benefit into account,” Schaible said “So for us, this is about getting the right drug to the right patient at the right time. And I think Medversation can help to achieve that goal.”

Once a breeding ground for dense jargon about mechanisms of action and prescribing information, Web sites like Centocor's new Medversation are giving doctors consumer-friendly content to help them spell out treatment options in a language everyone can understand.

Pharmaceutical Executive-11-19-2008

Consumer Advertising Spend Drops as New Drugs Dwindle

New Site Promotes Better Doctor/Patient Conversations