SUMMARY: With patients staying away from their doctors because of COVID, DTC messages need to add incentives and better messaging to get people to take action rather than wait. No one message will do this, however. Messages need to evolve in these special times.
Category Archive: DTC Spending
SUMMARY: There is a huge issue that’s challenging DTC marketers: online health misinformation. While we’re still trying to research the changes it has led to for DTC marketers, there are some observable behaviors taking place that we have examined through Google analytics. They paint a picture of people who are spending more time online looking to answer their questions and relying on HCPs to help sort out treatment choices.
SUMMARY:
- TV continues to be the dominant channel for DTC advertising.
- Some of the TV spots for drugs are horrible, and some products should even be on TV because of terrible fair balance.
- TV ads only drive awareness as the first step for online health seekers. More conversations are happening on social media, and pharma seems to be immune to the conversations.
- One of the reasons for such bad TV is the lack of talent within DTC marketing.
- Agencies are equally responsible for bad DTC TV.
SKIMMERS SUMMARY:
- According to a GAO Report “Medicare Parts B and D and beneficiaries spent $560 billion on drugs from 2016 through 2018, $324 billion of which was spent on advertised drug”.
- GAO’s review of four advertised drugs found that drug manufacturers changed their DTCA spending during key events, such as increasing spending when a drug was approved to treat additional conditions or decreasing spending following the approval of generic versions.
- The report fails to acknowledge the role of HCPs in prescribing medications and empowered patients who may have been educated by DTC ads.
- This report is going to lead to more calls to limit DTC advertising.
IN BRIEF: DTC managers usually have a tough time allocating DTC budgets, but once you layout your brand objectives and better understand your audience, the choices become clearer. Learn everything you can about your audience, such as “where are they online and what are they really looking for in treatment options?”.
SUMMARY: Television remains the most important medium for healthcare advertising, accounting for 54.7% of all spend in 2018, far higher than television’s 30.8% share of the advertising market as a whole. However, recent trends indicate that healthcare marketers are shifting more dollars to digital ads. The shift to digital advertising doesn’t make sense when pharma product websites don’t meet consumers’ needs.
SUMMARY: By far, the biggest question I get as a consultant is, “how much should we spend on DTC ads?”. It’s important to understand that no formula can be applied across all health conditions and products. It varies by the size of your audience and the number of diagnosed and undiagnosed patients.
SUMMARY: The number of visitors to your website doesn’t mean anything if you have high bounce rates and low page views/time on site. More than half of mobile users leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load, yet too many pharma sites are not optimized for mobile. Houston, we have a problem.