NaturalPedia > Direct-to-consumer Ads

Quotes about Direct-to-consumer Ads from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

Share

Tweet

Email to a friend   |  Click here for FREE email alerts

"You may have noticed the deluge of advertisements from drug companies in the media in the past several years. direct-to-consumer ads is a new trend and one that is predicted to strengthen; in 1997 drug companies spent about $1 billion on direct-to-consumer ads, but by 2004 that number had increased to more than $4 billion. Drug companies rely so much on profit generated from drugs, especially new ones attached to active patents, that they've begun persuasive marketing campaigns targeting consumers direcuy." - Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith, The Detox Strategy: Vibrant Health in 5 Easy Steps (Get the book.)

"As Ernestine McCarren, general manager of Ehrenthal & Associates, an advertising agency specializing in direct-to-consumer ads, explained in an interview for a trade magazine, "We want to identify the emotions we can tap into to get that customer to take the desired course of action. If you can't find that basic insight, you might as well forget everything else." DISEMPOWERING THE DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP Advertisers know that their challenge is to evoke emotional responses that are strong enough to override traditional doctor-patient relationships. Does it work?" - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"Merck plowed millions of dollars into direct-to-consumer ads, including a television spot featuring Olympic ice-skating champion Dorothy Hamill, who told viewers her arthritis had gotten so bad that she nearly had to stop skating until her doctor prescribed Vioxx. In parallel campaigns to market the drug to doctors, code-named "Project Offense" and "XXceleration," the company instructed its sales representatives to emphasize Vioxx's protective effects against gastrointestinal bleeds and to tell doctors that this benefit 210 outweighed any possible cardiac risks." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Marcia Angell, a physician and author of The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It, charges that companies routinely misinform the public with their direct-to-consumer ads; buy the loyalty of doctors with favors and gifts; inflate the benefits of drugs while deliberately obscuring their risks; and charge far too much for their products. At $ i co a month, Vioxx was ten times more expensive than older painkillers, which were just as effective for most patients at relieving pain in the clinical trials." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Network executives saw the pharmaceutical industry as a vast, untapped source of ad revenue, while ad agencies viewed direct-to-consumer ads as their clients' best hope for extracting as much profit as possible from their drugs before their patents ran out. By the early 1990s, pharmaceutical executives, who only a few years before had been aghast at the idea of pushing their drugs on the public, had come around to the notion that patients might even benefit from advertising—that consumers had a right to know about drugs." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Together with the advertising industry, drug companies also fought the FDA's restrictions on direct-to-consumer ads in the courts, by whittling away at legal distinctions between individual free speech and commercial speech. Companies claimed that their right to free speech was violated by restrictions on ads. A series of suits, culminating in a case heard before the Supreme Court in 1996, finally convinced the FDA that if pharmaceutical companies ever challenged its restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising, the agency might well lose the case." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"In other words, statins can prevent heart attacks in seemingly healthy people. And direct-to-consumer ads appear to help — albeit expensively — at getting more of those people (and their physicians) to adopt the drug. Bob Ehrlich's notion of making the campaign for Lipitor "all about the numbers" might not have been such a bad idea after all. About 10 million Americans now take one of five approved statins. But that success has come with its price as well. In 2000, the statin known as Baycol, made by Bayer, was removed from the market for causing thirty-one deaths from rhabdomyolysis." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"Network executives saw the pharmaceutical industry as a vast, untapped source of ad revenue, while ad agencies viewed direct-to-consumer ads as their clients' best hope for extracting as much profit as possible from their drugs before their patents ran out. By the early 1990s, pharmaceutical executives, who only a few years before had been aghast at the idea of pushing their drugs on the public, had come around to the notion that patients might even benefit from advertising—that consumers had a right to know about drugs." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Marcia Angell, a physician and author of The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It, charges that companies routinely misinform the public with their direct-to-consumer ads; buy the loyalty of doctors with favors and gifts; inflate the benefits of drugs while deliberately obscuring their risks; and charge far too much for their products. At $ i co a month, Vioxx was ten times more expensive than older painkillers, which were just as effective for most patients at relieving pain in the clinical trials." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Merck plowed millions of dollars into direct-to-consumer ads, including a television spot featuring Olympic ice-skating champion Dorothy Hamill, who told viewers her arthritis had gotten so bad that she nearly had to stop skating until her doctor prescribed Vioxx. In parallel campaigns to market the drug to doctors, code-named "Project Offense" and "XXceleration," the company instructed its sales representatives to emphasize Vioxx's protective effects against gastrointestinal bleeds and to tell doctors that this benefit 210 outweighed any possible cardiac risks." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"The overall pharmaceutical company budget for direct-to-consumer ads rose from $791 million in 1996 to $2.5 billion in 2000. The figures for overall marketing spending are astronomical. During 2000, more than $13.2 billion was spent on pharmaceutical marketing in the US alone.30 On all fronts, HRT was under serious assault, and if HRT was under attack, pharmaceutical companies were also under attack. Although the main thrust of the fight-back was organised by Wyeth and then some of the other companies that produced HRT, the whole industry geared up to defend itself." - Martin J. Walker, HRT Licensed to Kill and Maim: The Unheard Voices of Women Damaged by Hormone Replacement Therapy (Get the book.)

"The budget for these is far less than that for one-on-one promotions, though, and even less than the budget for direct-to-consumer ads. Still, it added up to $484 million in 2000.20 How good is the information in drug ads that appear in medical journals? In a widely publicized study, Dr. Michael Wilkes and his colleagues sent 109 ads to a group of experts and asked them to judge whether the ads met FDA guidelines. They felt that 92 percent of the ads failed to meet at least one standard, and 15 percent failed to meet eight or more standards." - Richard A. Deyo M.D. M.P.H., Donald L. Patrick, Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises (Get the book.) "In some cases, direct-to-consumer ads encourage patients to switch from their well-studied treatments to newer drugs whose safety and efficacy are less well known. Drug experts note that half the drugs approved by the FDA prove to have serious adverse effects that are unknown prior to approval.40 A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that one out of five new drugs will eventually be withdrawn from the market or receive a so-called black box warning of serious potential side effects—risks that were unknown when the drug was first marketed." - Richard A. Deyo M.D. M.P.H., Donald L. Patrick, Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises (Get the book.) "And the FDA, which is charged with overseeing direct-to-consumer ads, has frequently complained about lack of balance, incomplete information, or misleading claims.35 Consumers may mistakenly think that drug ads have to be approved by the FDA before they appear. But in fact, the FDA generally doesn't have the authority to preapprove ads before they go public. The review comes when the ads are printed or aired, and there's often a significant delay in sending regulatory warning letters." - Richard A. Deyo M.D. M.P.H., Donald L. Patrick, Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises (Get the book.) "In response to the new opportunity for direct-to-consumer ads, the drug industry has increased such promotion ninefold since 1994, to almost $2.5 billion in 2000. Most of this growth was in television advertising.20 In a 2001 survey, nearly a third of adults indicated that they had talked to a doctor about a drug they had seen advertised, and of those, 44 percent had received a prescription for the drug they asked about. In other words, one in eight Americans have gotten a specific prescription in response to a drug ad." - Richard A. Deyo M.D. M.P.H., Donald L. Patrick, Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises (Get the book.)

"Pay no attention to direct-to-consumer ads for prescription drugs. These are meant to sell drugs, not educate consumers, and they only add to the prices you pay. Finally, remember the admonition of the Washington Post editorial, quoted on page 215, to question those arguing big pharma's case about their sources of income. I can think of no better advice. Nowadays, even the most distinguished and apparently unbiased academics may be on the pharmaceutical industry's payroll. If they are, you need to be especially skeptical about their pronouncements." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) "But drug companies at least admit direct-to-consumer ads are primarily promotional. That is not what I will be talking about in this chapter. At issue in this chapter is the probably much larger amount spent on what drug companies contend are purely educational activities. Most of those are directed toward doctors. Although no outsider knows for sure, they probably account for the lion's share of the missing $35 billion of the marketing budget." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.)

FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.

TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalPedia.com

This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008, 2009 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.

ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of NaturalPedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.