2 Minutes for Boarding! Soft-Sell Drug Ad in Stanley Cup
Those of you watching last night's Stanley Cup final between the Edmonton Oilers and Carolina Hurricanes (yes, they were the once-proud Hartford Whalers) may have noticed a Web site URL printed on the boards behind the goal: AsthmaControl.com. Go there and you'll see a five-question quiz to help determine whether you have asthma, and if so, whether it's "under control." You go through the quiz, then you get a prompt to print the results out for your doctor. Just remember AsthmaControl.com, despite its altruistic-sounding name, is a GlaxoSmithKline advertisement. In the business this is called a "soft-sell" drug ad, because no drug is mentioned and the sales pitch is wrapped in warm fuzziness. GlaxoSmithKline makes Advair, a top-selling asthma drug. In February, the company reported booming sales for Advair. (This is from a British newspaper, so multiply the pounds figure of 6.7 billion by about 2 and you get $12 billion in sales overall, $6 billion for Advair).
There's another classic soft-sell on TV these days. You may have seen a commercial with lots of cheerful, happy vignettes in warm colors talking about creating a community for people afflicted with what Madison Avenue once called "the heartbreak of psoriasis" (there's no cure). The TV commercial mentions the Web site "Psoriasis Connect" and there's a glossy quarterly magazine floating around with a slightly different name, "Psoriasis Connections," which you can subscribe to on the Web site should you be so inclined. The Web site features a picture of a presumably healthy caucasian mother and her smiling son gazing into each other's eyes. The site's text is reassuring and empathetic, encouraging you to connect with experts "and people like you." You can even sign up and surrender your personal information to the companies that own the site, Amgen and Wyeth, so they can keep you up to date about how to buy Enbrel, their drug for your condition. (Should you crave a straight-ahead approach intended for doctors, skip the happy colors and pictures and go to Enbrel.com.) Says industry trade PharmaLive: "Enbrel sales generated the strongest growth among the entire industry's top 25 global prescription products in 2005. Worldwide sales of the drug reached $3.66 billion in 2005, an increase of 42% compared with 2004."
So obviously the ad campaigns are working, and I'm not making a judgment against them. You should read this paper by the Media Education Foundation (Noam Chomsky alert! He's on their board of advisers) to think that through. What I am saying is: Read the fine print. You have to scroll to the bottom of AsthmaControl.com and PsoriasisConnect.com to find the corporate logos and ownership statements. Sites like these may contain valuable and helpful information, but realize: Their intent is to sell you a drug. They want you to go to your doctor and ask for whatever drug it is they are selling. Big pharma's direct-to-consumer marketing has been controversial to the degree an industry trade group put forward a set of "guiding principles" for content.
Medical science accepts diversity of opinion about many things. There is probably more than one treatment for whatever problem you have, and it may not be in pill form. Get information about it from an unbiased source that's not trying to sell you something. If you need information on unbiased information sources, look here.