There are so many challenges facing DTC marketers right now including shrinking budgets and diversification of media that you have to wonder if there is enough talent to really break DTC marketing out of this funk. The priorities for pharma companies are to both reduce costs and to increase the effectiveness of all marketing programs. However is pharma it’s own worst enemy when it comes to embracing empowered health consumers and will antiquated processes and thinking limit DTC marketing ?
Category Archive: DTC Spending
KEY TAKEAWAY: The American Medical Association today called for a ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, with physicians suggesting that TV and magazine ads could be contributing to the rising cost of expensive treatments however, they are wrong and need to look at the facts.
KEY TAKEAWAY: It’s possible to launch a drug without having a huge DTC budget if your department is nimble enough to leverage and react on conversations happening around your drug via social media.
KEY TAKEAWAY: In advertising, the effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to an advertising message before a response is made and before exposure is considered wasteful. It would seem that a lot of brands don’t understand effective frequency as the same ads run again and again.
POST SUMMARY: Via the Financial Times: In the first three months of 2015, the total value of healthcare deals reached $95.3bn, accounting for 12 per cent of all merger and acquisition activity this year, and a 70 per cent increase on the same period a year ago. Does this mean pharma is throwing in the towel when it comes to innovation?
POST SUMMARY: DTC marketing’s objective, in the past, was to drive new Rx’s. Marketers ran commercials and patients went into their doctor to request the product or get a sample, but today the environment in which we market is more complex and filled with a lot of noise. So how do DTC marketers cut through to ensure their marketing is still relevant?
POST SUMMARY: The old theory was to place ads for prescription drugs on health sites like WebMD but today that alone doesn’t make much sense.
OK, I get it. DTC marketers have to show ROI to get budgets from bean counter who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing but that approach is going to lead to a decline in DTC marketing effectiveness.