Category Archive: DTC Spending

GAO Report on DTC/Medicare spending flawed

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.
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The right balance in DTC: Tv versus digital ads

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.

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The complicated ROI measurement for pharma

SUMMARY: The LinkedIn team had a unique take on measuring ROI. “77% of marketers measure ROI within the first month of their campaign, knowingly trying to “prove ROI in a shorter amount of time than their typical sales cycle., while only 4% of marketers even measure ROI over a six-month period or longer.” So how should DTC marketers really measure ROI?

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Is DTC effective?

According to a study in the Journal for American Board of Family Medicine “respondents (76%) said they were likely to ask a health care provider about advertised drugs; 26% said they had already done so. Among the 26% of respondents who talked to a health care provider about a specific prescription drug they saw advertised, 16% said they received a prescription for the advertised drug. But is this really true across all DTC?

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