Author Archives: Richard Meyer

About Richard Meyer

Passionate, award-winning Marketing and Media Executive with an MBA and 15+ years success implementing cutting-edge strategies. Career highlights include driving development/launch of a groundbreaking e-Marketing branding initiative for Eli Lilly product Cialis that led to Website becoming #1 online pharma destination (and #1 in prescription conversions), increasing leads 30% and ROI 38% for $1B manufacturer Medtronic

Reducing the number of companies between a product and a consumer

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  • Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier thinks something has to change within the pharmaceutical industry to fix the issue of drug pricing.
  • “I don’t understand where we live in a world where 50% of the value goes to the supply chain, ” Frazier said at an event at the Economic Club of New York last week.
  • Merck has published reports outlining the company’s average list and net price increases for its products. Merck’s average net prices after factoring in those discounts decreased by 1.9% in 2017 as list prices increased 6.6%.

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The cost barrier to healthcare

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  • One quarter of Americans say either they or someone in their family has skipped necessary medical care because of the cost.
  • Older Millennials (ages 27-36) are more likely to forgo care due to cost.
  • 56 percent say they’re either very or somewhat worried that they might not have affordable health coverage in the future.

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What if PBM’s disappeared?

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  • PBMs are primarily responsible for developing and maintaining the formulary, contracting with pharmacies, negotiating discounts and rebates with drug manufacturers, and processing and paying prescription drug claims.
  • While drug distributors convert 45% of their gross profit to EBITDA, and insurers and pharmacies around 30%, PBMs convert 85%.
  • Just three PBMs control eighty percent of the prescription market, driving enough revenue to put them way ahead of all drug manufacturers on the Fortune 500.
  • Express Scripts, by some estimates, the company’s profit per prescription has increased an average of 38% every year between 2003 and 2016. That kind of growth has landed Express Scripts at number 22 on the Fortune 500 list in 2017.

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Pharma’s primary customer is Wall Street, not patients

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  • The S&P 500 healthcare sector has been on a tear in recent months, on track for its best quarter in five years and surging to an all-time high on Friday.
  • A forensic accounting of available financial data of the pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck Sharp & Dohme, and Abbott—shows that from 2013 to 2015, these four multinational drug makers collectively avoided paying about $3.7 billion in taxes.
  • Publishing in JAMA Internal Medicine the median estimated cost of the full range of studies: $19 million to get new drug approval.
  • Pharma’s primary customer continues to be Wall Street.

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Let your audience design the perfect website

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  • Pharma marketers often view website creative as the key to building a great website, but bounce rates indicated that online health seekers disagree.
  • Your website homepage should be a combination of key messages that are important to USERS and intuitive navigation that makes it easy for online health seekers to find the information they are looking for.
  • As your brand moves through the life-cycle your home page should change to reflect updated needs of your audience.

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Spending more money on TV ads doesn’t make sense

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  • In 2019, people are expected to spend an average of 170.6 minutes each day on online activities like watching videos on YouTube, sharing photos on Facebook and shopping on Amazon. They’ll spend slightly less time — 170.3 minutes —watching TV.
  • In the U.S., however, TV is still king. Internet usage will not eclipse TV viewing there until 2020, according to Zenith.
  • Most advertisers are ahead of the curve, except pharma.. Globally, they’re expected to spend $60 billion more on internet than TV advertising in 2019.
  • 80 percent of Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for a health-related topic online, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

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