Industry Meets With FDA
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IMAGE SOURCE: Lipitor ad from Web site
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The drug industry wants to bring us more ads for Cialis, Claritin and Lipitor online via Google, Twitter and social media Web sites and will press its case with the FDA beginning Thursday.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is convening a two-day meeting to hear the drug industry’s position on Internet marketing, reports AP.
The FDA will develop guidelines on just how far the industry can go, similar to the current guidelines for broadcast and print media.
It is estimated that 83 percent of users search the Internet for health information and the pharmaceutical industry has trailed other retailers in using its marketing power, largely out of fear of running into FDA regulations.
“Given the unprecedented growth of the Internet as a source of health information, the FDA should facilitate the appropriate use of online media by America’s pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies to provide FDA-regulated information on medicines,” said PhRMA Senior Vice President Ken Johnson in a statement.
Johnson points out that the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA all use new media technologies to communicate.
PhRMA wants the FDA to adopt a universal safety symbol to indicate a linked page that contains FDA-regulated risk information, important since Twitter limits characters to 140.
Last April, the FDA warned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and a dozen other drug makers for using search engines but omitting drug risks in its sponsored links that appear on screen margins.
Pharmaceutical companies represented just four percent of online marketing, reports PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The vast majority of the industry’s $4.5 billion is still spent on TV and magazine ads, where the FDA sets the rules such as including side effects along with benefits.
Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) is believed to be effective in that patients ask for drugs by name, part of the ways in which health care costs are increased.
DTC ads became legal in 1985 in the U.S. and began to rapidly expand in 1997 when the FDA eased regulations on the advertising of drugs. Since then, the industry has poured money into this form of promotion, spending nearly $5 billion just last year. The only other country that allows DTC drug ads is New Zealand.
The FDA is unlikely to issue any new industry guidelines until 2011. #