Pfizer Advertisements
Pharmaceutical companies advertise with extreme prejudice, their ad budgets alone sponsor entire television channels and is second only to their lobbying division. Only two countries in the world allow direct consumer marketing of prescription products: the United States on free speech grounds and New Zealand because they have more sheep than people and sheep love commercials. Advertising works, it is extremely effective at driving customer demand. As always though there is regulation and that is why your drug commercials must be so long and drawn out so they can inform you of both the good and the bad that the drug could cause. The side effects listed on these commercials can be quite disturbing and much like the surgeon general's warning on cigarettes they usually go ignored, but they are there at least to give the appearance of balance.
Recently though I have noticed in my limited television watching that Pfizer changed the advertising game with their new commercials. At first it seems like any other commercial, happy people, sunny skies, healthy children playing everything needed to link Pfizer with raw emotional bliss, but it ends right there. There is no horrible list of side effects because there is no product they are selling in this commercial. It is a brilliant proactive advertising campaign, even if a bit dystopian. Long past having to bother marketing products to you they can leave that to their best sales representative, the state. Meanwhile they launch this new ad campaign telling us how great they are while never having to mention anything negative much less the over two billion in settlements against the company for alleged violations of the FDCA and False Claims Act in the past. Their skirting of regulation is impressive and if you believe in preventative medicine why not a proactive public relations campaign to protect against future legal liability the magnitude of which may be correlated with public opinion.
Advertisings place in health care has always been a little dubious; the best doctors are rarely also the best salespeople. If a product works then advertising should not be necessary and it should stand on its own merit. Sales can still be supercharged by a good marketing campaign though and it occurs at many more levels than just magazine and tv ads. Teams of attractive sales representatives for drug companies heavily promote new products to prescribers. Free drug dinners to learn about the latest branded product were common, often getting continuing education credit for attending. All drug companies would play these games pushing their most profitable products at the time. As patents would expire so would the marketing campaign for the drugs, the lunches and free pens would continue but with a different pharmaceutical sponsor every so often a lot like NASCAR. Today drug advertising is heavily regulated but pervasive as ever seeming almost symbiotic with mass media. Looking to the past we can find the best examples of malfeasance due to this collusion.
At the turn of the previous century, we lived in an age with zero regulation, and this would lead to the rise of patent medicines. Drugs claiming to have radical benefits and sold under brand names like Hamlin's Wizard Oil and Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound would saturate the market. These products were big sellers at the time and big buyers of advertising in the newspaper accounting for half of the ad revenue. James Harvey Young would write a more detailed history in his 1961 book The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation. Unfortunately, a few of these products would sometimes contain dangerously addictive substances like morphine or heroin.
This would lead to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act which required drug products to be labeled with what they were and require them to disclose dangerous substances like alcohol or cocaine and no detail of the label could be false or misleading. The wording of the act was unfortunately vague enough to invite different interpretations and it would be challenged in the 1911 supreme court case U.S. vs Johnson. The result of that decision was the clarification that the law only applied to false or misleading statements regarding its ingredients. False therapeutic claims however were not forbidden by the 1906 act.
Congress realizing its intentions had been subverted would respond with the 1912 Sherley Amendment prohibiting false therapeutic claims intended to defraud the purchaser. Once again however the language of the law “intended to defraud” would be a high prosecutorial hill to climb and so it would do little to curb the problem. It would be almost three decades later before another wave of public outrage over a hundred deaths linked to a liquid sulfanilamide product would once again cause congressional action. The 1938 Food Drug and Cosmetic act would require products to prove they were safe and require FDA approval prior to marketing. Pfizer ranks second behind only Glaxo-Smith-Kline for settlements due to alleged violations of this act, those settlements are in the billions, a liability their new advertising campaign elegantly avoids.
Jacob Hyatt Pharm D.
Father of three, Husband, Pharmacist, Realtor, Landlord, Independent Health and Medicine Reporter
https://substack.com/discover/pharmacoconuts
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Further reading and references
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690298/
Donohue J. A history of drug advertising: the evolving roles of consumers and consumer protection. Milbank Q. 2006;84(4):659-699. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0009.2006.00464.x
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1215373
https://www.fda.gov/files/about%20fda/published/The-Sulfanilamide-Disaster.pdf
