| DRUG ADS SHOW 'BEXTRA' CAUTION
By HOLLY M. SANDERS
April 12, 2005 -- The withdrawal of two once-heralded painkillers within months is putting pressure on Big Pharma to take a hard look at its marketing tactics.
In one prominent example, Johnson & Johnson has altered the tone of a recent campaign for its Ortho Evra birth-control patch to focus on potential medical concerns. One ad shows a doctor warning a young woman about the dangers of a stroke from smoking while on the patch.
Pfizer's decision last week to recall Bextra because of safety concerns — coming just six months after Merck's similar withdrawal of Vioxx — has added to a growing controversy over how companies market to consumers.
The nation's drug maker's spend an estimated $4 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising, with detractors saying that many of those ads aren't as forthcoming as they should be about potential dangers.
Critics accuse Pfizer and Merck both of using marketing to encourage millions of people to take the Cox-2 inhibitors even when the drugs were potentially dangerous.
Typically, drug ads on TV promote the benefits before a narrator races through the list of possible side effects in a fast-paced voiceover at the end. Similarly, magazine ads rely on small print to convey the risks to consumers, leaving room for consumer confusion, marketing experts say.
There are signs that federal regulators are addressing direct-to-consumer advertising as well. Trade publication Ad Age reported that the Food and Drug Administration had approved Amylin Pharmaceuticals' diabetes medication Symlin with the condition that it would not directly advertise the drug to consumers for one year.
The threat of legal liability and tighter federal oversight are reason enough for companies to consider self-regulation of marketing. But experts say there is another reason to think about changing their approach: Consumers are becoming increasingly cynical when it comes to advertising, and concerns about drug safety have further eroded their trust.
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