• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 1, 2010

The watchdog group Center for Digital Democracy has asked the Food and Drug Administration to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies are unfairly using behavioral targeting techniques to market drugs online.

"Digital marketing applications for selling cars, food, and financial products have already raised privacy and related concerns at the FTC. When applied to digital pharmaceutical and health marketing, such practices call for an even higher level of scrutiny and policy intervention," the advocacy group says in a new FDA filing.

The privacy organization is asking the FDA to take a host of steps, including examining data collection practices by pharmaceutical advertisers, reviewing privacy policies of such marketers as well as publishers, and requiring companies that use behavioral targeting to spell out their methods. "Consumers need to know whether and how they are being tracked and targeted -- including via 'condition-specific' channels," the filing states.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the CDD, adds that a "highly targeted, purposely immersive and subconsciously guided digital marketing apparatus" can be unfair to consumers when it comes to health marketing. "We want the FDA to make some policies related to pharmaceutical marketing that reflect the distinct nature of interactive marketing," he says.

Ad executives also say that behavioral targeting -- or serving ads to people who have already demonstrated an interest in particular medical conditions by reading about them -- benefits readers by providing them with relevant information. "Behavioral targeting is used across all verticals online, whether travel, banking or health," says Debrianna Obara, vice president of media at RazorfishHealth. "Pharmaceutical companies, or wellness clients, are not trying to do anything underhanded. They're really just trying to give hand-raisers the information that they're looking for."

Obara adds that pharmaceutical marketers don't use behavioral targeting for products related to "sensitive" categories, including oncology, depression and sexual dysfunction.

The CDD's filing listed several publisher sites that focus on health, including HealthCentral, which says that marketers can advertise on 35 condition-specific categories.

HealthCentral President and Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Shane says the company runs contextually targeted ads on HealthCentral sites -- that is, ads that relate to the content on its pages -- but doesn't directly offer behaviorally targeted ads on its own sites. HealthCentral also runs some Google AdSense ads, which can be targeted based on behavior; users can opt out of that cookie-based behavioral targeting by Google.

In addition, HealthCentral has a deal with Microsoft allowing the company to serve behaviorally targeted ads to some users who go to its sites after previously visiting HealthCentral. Users can opt out of those ads as well. That deal doesn't allow users to be targeted based on anything they have read at HealthCentral relating to mental health or sexual health.

Marketing and publishing executives also say that behavioral targeting doesn't violate people's privacy because such targeting is anonymous. While companies track Web users via cookies on their computers, the companies are not also collecting users' names, email addresses or other so-called personally identifiable information.

But the Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating behavioral targeting and privacy, said in a recent report that even non-personally identifiable information could be used to identify specific users.

The FDA currently is examining pharmaceutical marketers' use of online marketing and social media. Last year, the agency told more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies that their pay-per-click search ads were misleading because the ad copy touted the benefits of drugs without also informing consumers about risks and contraindications.