Zebra,WallSt Jour,VIVUS, today :Advertising Drug Companies' Ads Get Slicker
With Help from Madison Avenue
By YUMIKO ONO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Inside the U.S. headquarters of drugmaker Glaxo Wellcome, a dozen managers gathered recently for a lesson in a largely unfamiliar science: advertising. Tom Wilson, an agency-head whose New York shop, Wilson Media Group, handles some Glaxo accounts, translated some Madison Avenue jargon.
"Everybody with a colored piece of paper stand up," Mr. Wilson commanded. Nine of the 12 managers rose to their feet. "That's a 75% reach," he said.
Ever since the Food and Drug Administration relaxed guidelines for TV drug advertising, pharmaceuticals companies have been taking a crash course in consumer advertising. The guidelines, put in place during the summer, allow prescription-drug advertisers to omit the lengthy disclaimers and warnings required under the old rules. Although commercials must still include some warnings, drug advertisers have far more leeway to create slicker spots that will vie for attention with commercials for soda and soap.
The change has elevated the importance of advertising to drug makers. It has also made for some odd television. "Attention impotent men. All 20 million of you," a narrator intones in a current commercial for Muse, a prescription treatment. Vivus, the Mountain View, Calif., maker of Muse, and agency Hoffman/Lewis of San Francisco had hoped to air the spot during the nation's most-watched and most expensive advertising event, the Super Bowl. (General Electric's NBC network refused, saying it wasn't "appropriate" for the game's viewers.)
"We're so used to crafting the message for the clinical-thinking consumer, which is the physician," says Michael Miller, Vivus's director of marketing. "Now it's, 'How do we motivate someone to get off the couch after seeing our ad and run to the phone?' "
There is no shortage of experts helping drug companies learn to think more like a Coke or a Nike. Merck, the maker of osteoporosis-drug Fosamax, is consulting with behavioral scientist Caroline Schooler, who works for ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding, a unit of True North Communications. Dr. Schooler has identified three types of pill takers: "information-actives," who voluntarily call toll-free numbers for information; "indifferents," who are apathetic about health; and "passives," who need to be prodded to take their medicine.
Pharmacia & Upjohn recently hired John Sailors, an assistant marketing professor from the University of Michigan, as a training manager to hold seminars on the importance of "megabrands" such as Coke and Kleenex. At Glaxo, now in merger talks with drug company SmithKline Beecham, the advertising class is part of a five-day pilot training program that the company may expand.
Drug advertisers often find themselves in uncharted waters. When they worked on the first consumer advertising for Muse, the impotence remedy, people inside Vivus debated over whether to depict a real man in the ad. The answer was no: Consumers could draw wrong conclusions about impotence based on the demographics of the actor in the spot, they decided. Muse marketers also debated over whether consumers would mind speaking to a woman when they called a toll-free information number; Vivus decided they wouldn't.
London-based Glaxo has hired Rick Gleber, a onetime Clorox marketing executive and now Glaxo's first manager of consumer marketing. Mr. Gleber is trying to locate smokers' haunts so he can place ads there for Glaxo's stop-smoking pill, Zyban.
The consumer campaign for Zyban, which began in the fall, is "probably the first case where we have launched a [prescription] drug with such a strong focus on the consumer," Mr. Gleber says.
Glaxo is targeting places where smokers often crave a puff but can't have one. Thus, Zyban ads now appear in Playbill magazines, along with post-theater dining ads. In movie theaters, a giant purple Zyban pill flashes on the screen. Stuck in traffic in a nonsmoking cab? A poster on the side of a bus nearby declares, "Zyban is here."
Those ads augment a cryptic TV ad campaign for Zyban, which was created to meet the old FDA guidelines. In those spots, an ashtray fell and shattered while a narrator delivered a mysterious message ("Not a patch. Not a gum. But prescription medicines that can help reduce your urge to smoke and help separate you from your cigarettes.")
The new shift in thinking has fueled a fast rise in pharmaceuticals-ad spending. For the first 10 months of 1997, drug companies raised consumer-ad spending by 45%, to $733.8 million, according to Competitive Media Reporting, which tracks media expenditures.
But with so much more at stake, drug clients demand results. "We have to do our homework very, very well in order to justify and support our decision" to advertise on TV and radio, says Jan Creidenberg, product manager for Hoechst's antihistamine, Allegra. Hoechst recently advertised Allegra during "The X-Files," where a 60-second spot typically costs about $580,000. That compares with less than $11,000 for a full page in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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