Animation in Drug Advertising
Today, there are only two countries in the world that allow direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, the United States and New Zealand. Most of the drugs advertised on television in these countries require a prescription and many are quite expensive. In order to sell enough products, pharmaceutical companies market their drugs heavily, spending nearly $5 billion on such advertisements annually. However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandates that drug advertising disclose all risks associated with taking the medication. For many drugs, this includes a long list of terrifying side effects, including death. And since drug companies don’t want to spend billions of dollars on advertisements that scare away all of their customers, they tend to employ several strategies to mask the seriousness of the side effects. One of the most common strategies companies use is the utilization of animated characters in their ads. These cartoons often help people to remember the brands better and they commonly serve as a reminder for what the drug accomplishes. On the other hand, these characters often distract the viewer from the narrator who is calmly citing the side effects and their cute and playful presence downplays the seriousness of those side effects.
In March of 2016, the FDA recognized the potential of these cartoon characters to distract and mislead viewers in a notice in the Federal Register. In this notice, they stated,
“To our knowledge, no studies have comprehensively examined how animation affects consumers’ benefit and risk perceptions in drug ads, how various animation strategies (e.g., symbolizing the disease vs. the benefit) influence these perceptions, and whether these effects are generalizable across different patient populations…”
To address this concerning gap of knowledge, they outlined experiments they plan to perform to gain insight into this topic. There were two major research questions that the FDA will attempt to answer with these experiments. First, they seek to determine how consumer processing of DTC prescription drug advertisements differ depending on whether the ad is live-action or animated. And Second, how consumer processing differs depending on whether the sufferer, the disease, or the benefit is the focus of the animation.
To find the answers to these questions, the FDA developed several experiments including one that uses human actors as a control group and then uses varying levels of animation including human animations and non-human characters. They, then, look at how participants’ perceptions and understanding of of the drugs risks and benefits differ between the groups. A second experiment examines whether the object of the animation (patient, disease, or benefit) influences these same factors. They, also, examine the participants’ general attitudes and emotional responses to the advertisement, brand, product, and character. The results to these up-coming experiments will give us more insight into how these advertisements affect public perception.
In 2015, the American Medical Association called for a ban of all direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, claiming that the such ads
“inflate demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”
However, pharmaceutical companies continue to claim these advertisements are vital for public health because they lead many high risk patients to have life-saving conversations with their doctors. Until modern science can provide more definitive evidence to prove either side’s case, the United States will remain an outlier when it comes to direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Hopefully, these experiments done by the FDA will provide some answers, but either way we need much more research on this topic to protect the public from these ads’ potential detrimental effects.
