DTC Ads Provide the Right Prescription - direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals

Brandweek, June 29, 1998 by Susan Miller

Susan Miller is executive vice president and director of cheat services at Cline, Davis & Mann, New York. a healthcare advertising and marketing communications agency. Phone: (212) 907 4300.

Today, as American consumers take a much more proactive interest in their own health, pharmaceutical companies are taking an equally proactive interest in consumers, as evidenced by the recent explosion in marketing prescription drugs via direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. Yet, some critics of DTC ads still maintain that information from a for-profit enterprise (namely, the drug company) is unreliable at best and downright dangerous at worst.

DTC pharmaceutical advertising, however, is healthy for the American public, and with new FDA guidelines on televised drug advertising, it only stands to become more robust. In fact, the successful marriage of the drug companies' profit motive and their patients' interest are precisely what makes DTC so successful.

These recently liberalized rules on DTC advertising have presented U.S. drug companies with an unprecedented opportunity to achieve what most people want: a greater number of better informed patients seeking aggressive, early treatment. Until now, that hadn't been the case. While Americans have what is arguably the premier healthcare delivery system in the world, a staggering number of us never receive any delivery at all. Many diseases, from diabetes to hypertension to high cholesterol and depression, are significantly undiagnosed and undertreated.

Even when suffering is acute, many patients still do not pursue medical attention, as evidenced by a disease like depression. According to a recent Journal of Clinical Psychiatry article, 10% of the U.S. population aged 18 to 54 suffers from a depressive disorder in any given year. Yet, less than half the patients needing anti-depressant medication ever receive it. This is particularly tragic since the vast majority of these individuals could be delivered from suffering, given the appropriate diagnosis and treatment.

It is in precisely such a case that DTC advertising can make a profound difference. The industry can actually deliver awareness of disease and motivate sufferers to seek help in a doctor's office, and can even play a role in helping more physicians to recognize and treat depression, an area that has traditionally fallen out of the purview of general practice. Here, ally argument against the incremental cost that DTC advertising adds to the price of prescription drugs pales when compared to the savings ill human costs.

In diseases like hypertension and dyslipidemia abnormal cholesterol levels), the drug industry can deliver patients to doctors' offices for disease-limiting, life extending treatment. With dyslipidemia, DTC advertising has already had a robust effect. A breakthrough class of cholesterol-lowering drugs first became available in 1987, but only in the last three years have they begun to approach a popular awareness and mass market use. Albeit, this has much to do with the mounting epidemiological, and now clinical, evidence of their effects. But it's also due to awareness delivered by DTC advertising. Since 1994, nearly $150 million has poured into media coffers to promote the various cholesterol-lowering brand to consumers.

In therapeutic categories where patients have been self medicating with marginally effective over-the-counter brands, DT(' advertising lets consumers know that more effective options exist. Today, thousands of allergy sufferers benefit from advanced, non-sedating treatment they might never have known exists, were it not for the efforts of Schering, Pfizer and Hoechst. In the fair market pursuit of prescriptions, these companies have played a decisive role in driving patients into doctors' offices seeking help.

DTC ads can extend hope to patients who previously had nothing new in their battle against disease, or who were unaware that treatment was available. In conditions like migraine and arthritis, DTC advertising can create a new reason to pursue relief from painful, often life-limiting conditions. In benign prostatic hyperplasia (prostate enlargement that causes annoying urinary frequency), advertising can inform men that they don't have to live their lives searching for a men's room; treatment is available.

Like it or not, the pharmaceutical industry makes its living from these drug prescription's But at the same time, millions of Americans are living longer, healthier lives, given the right prescription for what ails them. It's in the interest of medicine, family and society that this continues. And if the pharmaceutical industry can contribute to our health and wellbeing through DTC ads, we're all better off in the end.