Prescription For
Change
Alex Frangos - Wall Street Journal
April 23, 2001
Drug companies are slowly starting to warm
up to the Web as a place to
advertise
(Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
With health information such a major draw on
the Web, drug companies would seem to be a natural fit for online advertising.
And, indeed, the ads are out there -- but they're not always obvious.
In the first half of last year, only 4%, or
about $54 million, of the industry's consumer-ad spending went to online
pitches such as banner ads and e-mail marketing, according to Cyberdialogue, a
New York-based Internet market-research firm.
However, that number doesn't include a
category of ads that's fast becoming popular among drug companies.
Increasingly, say health-care analysts, the companies are focusing their online
efforts on creating content rather than straightforward advertisements. So,
drug makers are forming partnerships with third-party sites to supply them with
information on diseases and other medical conditions; sometimes the drug
companies create sites of their own that discuss, say, baldness or multiple
sclerosis.
But there is a sales pitch there, even if it's
buried. The sites -- whether third-party or proprietary -- almost always
contain a link to a site that does hawk the drug company's product. The usual
come-on: Find out about a possible treatment for the disease you've just read
about.
Drug companies are taking this tack for a
number of reasons. For one, it dovetails nicely with their television
campaigns. In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration loosened rules to allow
drug companies to promote prescription drugs on TV without detailing all the
side effects -- as long as the companies referred viewers to a magazine ad or
toll-free number where they could get the whole story. Now, some of those TV
ads direct viewers to Web sites.
Another reason for the drug companies'
reluctance to advertise aggressively online is uncertainty over consumer
reaction. While people clearly use the Internet to find out about diseases and
treatments, they're choosy about whom they trust. Cyberdialogue says that 16%
of patients who requested a specific drug from their doctor learned of the drug
on the Internet. Television, by contrast, came in at just 11%. (The top
category, at 27%, was friends and family.) At the same time, according to
research firm Jupiter Media Metrix Inc., only 11% of patients said they would
trust information from a pharmaceutical company's Web site.
Thus, drug makers are making promotional deals
where they supply information but their corporate identity gets played
down.
One popular option: sponsorship deals with
third-party health sites such as WebMD Corp. and DrKoop.com Inc. In these
deals, pharmaceutical companies provide the sites with content on diseases; in
return, the drug makers get banner ads and prominent links to their material on
the site -- and, more important, an appearance of neutrality that ads can't
provide.
"For a pharmaceutical company, there is a
lot of value in being linked to WebMD," says Pat Fili-Krushel, CEO of
WebMD's consumer division. "We reach millions of health-care users on a
monthly basis, and they want to get their specific message out to those
users."
For example, if you click on pain management in
WebMD's menu, you'll find a listing of the site's proprietary articles -- and
then a highlighted box that links to a "chronic pain resource
center," from "our partner," Medtronic Inc. The resource center,
which is located on WebMD's site and within its frame, contains a number of
articles about pain management -- as well as a pitch to prospective candidates
for Medtronic's pain therapy.
WebMD says that its site follows strict
guidelines set out by hi-ethics, a consortium of online health sites charged
with creating privacy and disclosure standards. "It is always clear if you
are in WebMD content or if you are in a sponsor's content," says Ms.
Fili-Krushel.
Sponsor content, for example, must prominently
display the company's logo and copyright information. Moreover, Ms.
Fili-Krushel says, the content drug companies provide is preapproved by the
FDA.
But drug companies aren't relying solely on
other sites to get their message across. Some companies are starting their own
Web outposts -- and trying out a wide range of pitches.
Among the subtlest: "soft sell" Web
sites, which provide information on a disease without mentioning the drug. For
example, Merck & Co., the Whitehouse Station, N.J., drug maker, runs
television ads describing hair loss and encourages men who are worried about it
to visit thinhair.com. Neither the commercial nor the site mentions Merck's
baldness treatment, Propecia; instead, the site offers information on hair
loss. But it prominently displays a banner ad that says, "If you would
like information on one such treatment, click here." The link leads to
Propecia.com.
Soft-sell advertising has a number of
advantages for the drug companies. Not mentioning the drug directly gives the
impression that the site is independent, which increases consumer confidence in
the site's reliability. Because it provides information on the disease, not the
drug, it caters to consumers' innate interest in researching their conditions
before they seek treatment. Further, without the drug's name in display, the
company doesn't have to follow FDA rules that require the disclosure of the
drug's side effects and dangers.
The FDA has no special rules on drug
advertising online and has no jurisdiction over any publication that doesn't
mention a drug by name, such as thinhair.com. (When a drug name is mentioned --
on Propecia.com, for instance -- the advertiser must follow the same standards
that govern print advertising. Promotions must be truthful, provide fair
balance about benefits and risks and include a summary of the drug's labeling
information.) Still, the FDA warns consumers to proceed cautiously when it
comes to health information online. "I would be aware of who the sponsor
is," says Melissa Moncavage, public-health adviser in the FDA's division
of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications. She says consumers should
take note of "who is writing the information, how old the information is
and especially of messages that seem too good to be true."
Some consumer advocates and doctors are worried
about these types of sites. Larry Sasich, pharmaceutical expert for the
Washington, D.C., watchdog group Public Citizen, says drug-company sites that
try to educate patients about a condition are dangerous. He says people who go
online for health information often are not discerning enough to see the
difference between an unbranded pharmaceutical site and genuine third-party
health information. The "line between science and promotion has been
blurred," he says.
Richard Roberts, president of the American
Association of Family Physicians, in Leawood, Kan., and a professor of family
medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, says pharmaceutical
promotion online suggests patients take a "caveat browser" approach.
"Making people aware of conditions is potentially a good," he says,
but that is balanced by the potential for "promoting inappropriate or
unnecessary services." He wouldn't comment directly on
thinhair.com.
Merck spokesperson Chris Fanelle says the
company doesn't see it that way. According to her, thinhair.com is a
help-seeking ad, meaning it raises awareness for people who might not know
treatment is available. In terms of people thinking thinhair.com is an
independent site, Ms. Fanelle says Merck voluntarily puts its logo on the site
to let consumers know the source of the information.
An extension of the soft-sell approach is
so-called community-awareness sites, which offer coupons, quizzes, polls,
graphics and chat rooms on specific diseases or drugs. The goal is to educate
consumers about a condition and show how it can be treated with the
pharmaceutical company's drug.
One such site, mswatch.com, caters to
multiple-sclerosis sufferers, their families, and their caregivers. Teva
Neuroscience Inc., the maker of Copaxone, one of the three major MS drugs on
the market, produces the site in conjunction with New York Internet
health-systems provider Softwatch Inc. According to Teva, the site has 27,000
registered users.
The site includes a discussion board, a library
with background info on MS, advice on how to manage symptoms, latest news in
the MS field and a diary area, where patients upload their daily treatment
regimen. The company conducts semiannual surveys of the site's registered
users, which serve as a focus group that provides insights to the company on
what MS sufferers want and need. In the competitive MS drug market, knowing
your customer can help edge out the competition. There are three similar MS
drugs produced by different companies; in addition to Copaxone, there's Beta
Seron, by Berlex Laboratories Inc., a subsidiary of Schering AG of Germany, and
Avanex, by Biogen Inc. Studies show little difference in effectiveness, so
competition for customers is fierce. (The other two drug makers also have
sites.)
At the bottom of every page is the Teva logo
and copyright, and the "Managing MS" section contains an article on
using Copaxone. Atul Singh, head of e-business for Teva Neuroscience, says
mswatch isn't intended to promote the drug, per se. "The focus here is on
education," he says. "On the mswatch site we don't say that Copaxone
is the best drug. We provide more information on the disease than on the
therapy."
Asaf Evenhaim, the president of Softwatch, says
the goal of community-oriented sites is to "provide value to your
customers and benefit from the Web as an effective environment to build those
relationships."
One user of the site, Cindy Pavich, thinks the
world of mswatch, even though she uses Avanex, one of Copaxone's rival drugs.
The 40-year-old insurance-claims adjuster from Utah was diagnosed with MS two
years ago and says she found out about the site from an ad in Inside MS, a
magazine for people with the disease. She checks the site daily and
participates in the chat for newly diagnosed patients every evening. When the
maker of Avanex opened its own community site, Ms. Pavich checked it out but
decided to stick with mswatch. "I've made friends here," she says.
"This is my support."
Some critics urge caution, however. The
Multiple Sclerosis Society of America, a national nonprofit organization
dedicated to helping MS sufferers and the publisher of Inside MS, says people
need to be careful of health information on the Internet. "Before people
make any kind of decision on their medical future they need to go to vetted
sites that have no particular ax to grind," says Arney Rosenblat,
spokesperson for the New York-based group.
Ms. Rosenblat's suggestion? Her group's own
site, nmss.org.
---
Delivery Systems
How much drug companies spent in various advertising outlets in the
first half of 2000 -- and how much they got out of it
Per-Patient
Ad Spending Cost*
TV $833 million $152
Print 460 million 318
Internet 47 million 54
*The estimated cost of using each medium to get one patient to ask his
or her doctor for a particular prescription
Source: Cyberdialogue
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