Marketing Group Wants To Loosen Drug Advertising

NEW YORK -- A coalition of drug marketers and advertising agencies is hoping to change a cornerstone of pharmaceutical marketing and do away with the detailed warning information that accompanies all drug advertising, an official said Thursday.

The current format of drug ads is “over-warn and under-inform,” said John Kamp, executive director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication, a Washington-based marketing advocacy group.

He stressed in an interview that his group did want not warnings to be eliminated altogether, rather that patients get the information from sources other than advertising, such as their own doctor.

“The risk disclosures in ads [should] be focused on what consumers need to know. They [should] be fashioned to be understood by consumers.”

The move is a marked deviation from the prevailing thinking around the marketing and selling of drugs.

“Ads aren’t perfect communication vehicles, ads are awareness- creating vehicles,” Kamp said. “If you try and make them educational you’re going to cram too much into them.”

The anti-risk-information stance is also at odds with that of the Food and Drug Administration, which has been rigorous about enforcing side-effect and risk info in DTC ads.

CHC’s members include many health communications and marketing professional associations, including the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, Medical Marketing Association, and the Public Relations Society of America, according to a statement.

Notably absent from that list is Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the pharmaceutical industry group, which has voluntary rules urging “balance” between promotional and side-effect information on DTC ads, and any specific drug company.

In contrast, CHC literature states that risk information should be made “simpler,” because current advertising is so “complicated” that “many consumers cannot understand or use [it] on a practical basis.”

The group wants ads to state that “all drugs have risks, including this one,” Kamp said. “You need to talk to your doctor so you can inform the prescription decision.”

Kamp and Peter Pitts, a former FDA official and the director of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, will hold a press conference Friday to present a petition, Kamp said in an interview this afternoon.

Portions of their petition were given to Brandweek.

“The Coalition recommends that the FDA begin to develop new rules that stress the use of clear, understandable and retainable messages about benefits and safe use of prescription drugs,” the document reads, “with an emphasis on the information that a consumer needs to discuss medication options with a physician.

Kamp said that the petition was written with the help of an informal committee of health communications and marketing specialists, including Tom Lom of Saatchi & Saatchi and Medscape.com founder Peter Frishauf, Kamp said.

--Jenny Holland, with Jim Edwards