Unbranded
Pharmaceutical advertisements often make patients feel uneasy because of their long, daunting lists of side effects. When a pharmaceutical company makes a commercial about a specific drug, they must list out all the known potential side effects that have been associated with the medication. These side effects often include severe conditions like stroke, heart attack, or even death. For viewers, this is quite off putting and the frightening side effects are often all they can remember from the advertisements. Pharmaceutical companies have come up with a very sneaky way of combatting this issue with what is known as unbranded advertising.
Unbranded advertisements are ads that do not mention any specific drugs at all, but rather aim to raise awareness of a certain condition and often highlight the drastic consequences of facing that condition without medication. A good example of this type of advertising is a commercial released relatively recently by a company called Mylan. Mylan is currently under fire for hiking up the price of Epipens from $100 for two pens to over $600 dollars in only a few years. With their stock prices steadily falling, they released this unbranded advertisement to attempt to bolster sales without further harming their public image. In this advertisement, they depict a frightening scene in which a teenage girl goes into anaphylactic shock during a party with her friends. It lists off some statistics about the severity and frequency of these episodes, then asks you to visit a web page called, FaceYourRisk.com. This website is dedicated to educating the public about the physiology and dangers of different allergies. This may seem beneficial but the site is studded with links to Epipen’s website and it lists Epipen as the only form of treatment for anaphylaxis. Neither the website nor the advertisement says anything about the risks of the medication. It simply instills fear of the consequences of living without this medication that currently costs over $300 dollars per use.
Another example of this type of advertising was aired during this past super bowl, one of the most viewed televised events in the country. Companies dish out millions of dollars just to earn a one minute time slot during the super bowl. This commercial very similar to the mylan commercial in that it educates viewers about a certain condition, Opioid-induced constipation (OIC), but does not mention any specific medication. It does, however, mention the company name, Astrazeneca, at the end of the ad and asks you to visit the website, OICisdifferent.com. When you arrive at the website the first thing you see is a large link saying, “Discover a prescription treatment option,” leading you straight to the site for Movantik, Astrazeneca’s newest drug for treating OIC. Again, neither the ad nor the site mentions any risk factors for the medication because they don’t technically mention the drug at all, only provide a link to its website.
On the surface it seems that drug companies are moving in the right direction in terms of patient education, but they are still implementing questionable sales tactics with every move. This new form of advertising illustrates that no matter how strict the regulation on drug marketing may be companies will always find a way to manipulate the public with them. This leads me to believe that abolishing direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements entirely may be the only truly viable course of action in protecting public health from their harmful effects.
