• Ad Age, Friday, May 15, 2009 10:45 AM

In a move that Marissa Miley and Rich Thomaselli call a "PR masterstroke," Pfizer says it will give away selected prescription drugs to workers who have lost their health insurance because they've been laid off. The program, called Maintain (an acronym for Medicines Assistance for Those who Are in Need), will provide more than 70 drugs manufactured by Pfizer, including cholesterol-lowering agent Lipitor and erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, at no charge to consumers who qualify.

"It's probably worth more than $100 million in free advertising," says Dorothy Wetzel, the former vp-consumer marketing at Pfizer who now runs her own health-care ad agency, Extrovertic. "Think of the goodwill, think of the brand advocates they're creating by providing these medicines."

Pfizer is counting on word-of-mouth to promote the program; it will not advertise through traditional media. A former pharmaceutical company executive says the cost to Pfizer will not be as high as people think because "it doesn't cost a lot to manufacture the pills or package them." The main expenses for Big Pharma are research and development, and marketing.

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