Sony Ta and Dominick L. Frosch
Executive Summary
Pharmaceutical companies adapt their marketing strategies to changing opportunities within the regulatory environment, society, and the marketplace. Over the last decade, direct-to-consumer advertising has played an increasingly important role in drug promotion and has generated a significant amount of research and debate. Product placement, which is a form of consumer targeted marketing that integrates brands into storylines, is a growing phenomenon as well and has also stimulated much discussion. Although still uncommon, pharmaceutical product placement seems to be a natural convergence of both of these popular marketing tools, and the potential for this warrants attention. This article reviews the literature on product placements; current industry practices with pharmaceutical placements; and Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission marketing policy. Findings suggest that the brand marketing industry recognizes the opportunity with drug placements and that current federal policy seems inadequate to address this new form of advertising. Prescription medications have a unique status as a product category in terms of regulatory oversight, risk to consumers, consumer access, and perception. As such, policies need to be tailored accordingly.
Biography
Sony Ta (MD) is a National Research Service Award fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Department of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research. He completed his training in Internal Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 and obtained a medical degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Dominick L. Frosch (PhD) is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles. He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, San Diego, and spent two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. His research, funded by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, focuses on improving patient participation in clinical decision making and the impact of consumer-targeted prescription drug advertisements on health beliefs and behavior.
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring 2008
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