Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

Over the past year, I’ve been reading Richard Meyer’s blog, World of DTC Marketing, with great interest.  Meyer serves as Senior Global eMarkeing Manager for Medtronic and worked at Eli Lilly and Company for many years.  He is well-qualified to discuss direct to consumer (DTC) advertising and other drug marketing tactics.  For quite a while Meyer has been encouraging his colleagues to reduce their reliance on DTC advertising.  Last month, he wrote a wonderful post focusing on why many pharmaceutical marketers have been slow to embrace social media communications tactics.  He said:

“DTC marketers are great at coming up with a myriad of excuses why they can't do things because the FDA regulates the DTC industry. The truth is that there are many ways to connect with customers using Web 2.0 that will keep even the most conservative legal and regulatory people happy. We're all paid to take risks and part of that risk taking is working with internal resources to make them understand that the battlefield has changed.

 

Over and over again when I recommend tactics in my consulting work I hear the phrase 'I'll never get this passed regulatory or legal.' [Your] job is to protect your brand, and company, from making mistakes and getting letters from the FDA. The FDA, however, does not fully understand the Web and has not issued any in depth guidelines for DTC advertising on the Internet. I am sure that eventually they will get around to issuing guidelines for DTC advertising on the Internet but for now marketers should be leading the way into these uncharted waters.”

I couldn’t agree more with Meyer.  This is why I’m pleased to announce that my firm, Envision Solutions, has partnered with the brand monitoring company TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony and the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, LLP to help drug companies overcome the legal and regulatory obstacles associated with social media communications and monitoring.  We have developed the pharmaceutical industry’s first white paper that provides strategies to help it embrace social media without violating DTC promotional regulations.

I encourage drug industry executives and others interested in conducting successful pharmaceutical social media communications to download this free white paper (registration required).  We will also discuss this paper during a special Webinar scheduled to take place on September 11 at 1:00 p.m. Click here to learn more.