Pharmaceutical advertising has been a growth sector in advertising for years in the U.S., with a significant portion on television, as any viewer of the medium today knows well, and as eMarketer
well documents.
Pharma advertising on TV has also
been in the news a lot lately, under fire particularly from the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
This begs a question: Why are there so many pharma ads on TV today, and why has
this number been increasing for years? Here are some of the reasons why:
Pharma is a massive, growing category of consumer spending. Full stop. Consumer ad spend generally tracks
with category size and growth. Pharma is no different. According to Nova Advisor, pharmaceutical spend in the U.S. is just over $600 billion per year, and is growing at more than 6% per year.
TV ads work. Delivering full-screen sight, sound and motion video to lean-back adults on a big screen can help brand awareness scale efficiently like no other medium. If your goal
is to inform and activate a significant number of people about a relevant product or condition they're not aware of, TV steps up.
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Demo appropriateness. Pharma consumers are in
TV’s sweet spot. According to the AARP, nine in 10 Americans over 60 take prescription drugs. Magnet ABA Therapy tells us that “60% of pharmaceutical usage [in the U.S. is]
concentrated among adults aged 40-79 years.”
Privacy-safe targeting. Not only does TV reach pharma consumers at scale, but it is practically privacy-safe by design. You
can use techniques like data-driven linear ad targeting, based on aggregated data rather than personal data, which delivers ads to groups of people rather than tailoring each and every ad. And there
are plenty of techniques to tie ad deliveries back to key data sets like “script lift,” with privacy-vetted platforms that don’t expose protected consumer health data.
Self-evident impact. Best of all, given the scale of TV, many pharmaceutical advertisers don’t even need sophisticated attribution models. They see the results immediately, in
everything from organic search activity and website visits, to mentions by health care providers and an eventual rise in prescriptions. Tech to validate many of these observations is low-cost and
accessible.
So, given how significant TV is to pharmaceutical advertisers, should we be worried that the government might shut the channel down? For sure, it’s an area of concern, and
one we all need to watch.
My own take is that we won’t see any significant curtailing of pharma ads, because a), they fundamentally enable consumers to be more informed in managing their
health; b), the regulatory framework of broadcast, cable and streaming is so different that a holistic regulation is impossible; and c), critically, shutting down pharma ad revenue would imperil local
TV stations, among the most important and valuable free media platforms for each and every member of Congress.
What’s your take on the future of pharma ads on TV?