Sponsored ads can still be a healthy part of a pharmaceutical brand’s marketing mix.
Lindsay Millsap, Search Engine Marketing Strategist at Siren Interactive, contributes this post:
Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent out an unprecedented 14 warning letters to some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical giants regarding misleading Internet ads, also known as paid search advertising or sponsored ads. Sponsored ads are the pay-per-click ads featured in the sidebars of most major search engine results pages, including Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live.
The FDA’s Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications (DDMAC) accused the drug companies for three main violations:
- Omitting complete risk and indication information associated with the product
- Not including the drug’s full name in the ad
- Not including details of the drug’s limitations, such as age, gender, drug interactions, etc.
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The first example I saw where they used contextual advertising was when I went to the site and looked up "autism." At the top was a pretty sophisticated interactive ad for Cymbalta.
One of the other presenters at the CBI conference I spoke at last week really sparked my interest. Revolutionhealth was presenting to the mostly pharma audience about contextual advertising on their community health site.
They have a site with forums for patients to post stories. What a great example of web 2.0 at work in a positive behavior-changing way. The site includes cited information from places like The Mayo Clinic, and an easy-to-use navigation system for understanding a diagnosis, treating it, caring for patients, and of course it has community forums. One huge benefit of patients and caregivers posting on their site is that there is constantly new content, and their search ranking is also legitimately high.
The first example I saw where they used contextual advertising was when I went to the site and looked up “autism.” At the top was a pretty sophisticated interactive ad for Cymbalta.
Brands are starting to do this using Google as well. The classic example is the Lunesta ad which shows up in the middle of the night on web gaming sites. I can’t wait to see how far this will go the more we learn about actual behavior (from paying close attention to the data). I expect to be surprised by the seemingly random connections that will be made between different communities of people.
We are still clearly at the beginning of this trend. eMarketer predicts that US spending on search marketing tactics other than paid search ads will increase through 2011, but that more than one-half will continue to go to more general key word buys.
