For the first three quarters of 2007, pharmaceutical firms’spending on newspaper advertising plummeted, to $57 million from $84 millionfor the same period in 2006. Why is newspaper spend drying up?
Stu Klein
EVP, general manager,
Alchemy
The decline in newspaper spend in 2007, on the surface,appears to mirror both the decline in DTC spending (especially in Q3) and thedecline in ad revenue being suffered across the newspaper industry. Within DTC, as brands’ strategiesevolve year-to-year, the decision to incorporate newspaper media is driven bythe immediacy of the medium. If abrand has urgent news, there are few media that can disseminate the messagemore rapidly than newspapers; if a brand’s strategy is focused onbrand-building, then papers are typically inefficient for this purpose, assustainability of the message is difficult to achieve in this medium.Ironically, of the major ad spending industries, pharma, with its traditionaltarget of 50+, is the one industry where newspapers should be performingstrongly, as this demographic is one of the few that still relies on newspapersfor their daily source of news.
Meg Walsh
Managing partner, president of consumer and e-business,
CommonHealth
Historically, pharma has used newspapers to delivercorporate messages and brand news to the public, Wall Street and thoughtleaders, since they reach a mass audience and have short lead times. However,only 3% of DTC spending was doled out for newspaper advertising. In 2007, wesaw a massive overall decline in newsworthy brand dissemination and corporateadvertising spending. We’ve foundthat as consumers increasingly personalize their information needs, using RSSfeeds and customized news pages like iGoogle, both newspapers and the pharmaindustry will need to adapt to this evolving news-gathering environment andfind innovative ways to get the messages out.
Anne Devereux
CEO, LyonHeart,
CEO, TBWA World Health
While newspaper spend may have declined by a third, parallelexpenditures in the online space escalated at an even higher rate. Thistrade-off makes complete sense: Print as a DTC media vehicle was historicallyintended to provide a greater depth of information than TV and to ensure thatthe complex information could be processed and understood. Recently, asconsumer trust of online information has increased, Americans now turn to theinternet as their primary source for health information, and use the internetin the same way that they used to use print. Further, newspaper as a specificvehicle was historically used as an indirect way to reach investors. Withscrutiny on DTC ROI (ensuring every insertion drives acquisition or retention)those investment-related strategies are being abandoned for lower cost/higherreturn media options.
Jason E. Klein
President and CEO,
Newspaper National Network LP
Pharmaceutical spending in newspapers has had extremely wideswings in the past few years. Spending peaked in 2006 at $120 million with a 15% gain, plus we haveseen gains again in 2008 led by the cholesterol category. No other medium can provide the quickturnaround and broad reach and impact of newspapers, particularly given thehurdles in producing a television commercial. Campaigns have often been fairly substantial covering thetop 25 to 40 markets with multiple insertions. In the fourth quarter of 2006five brands—Bristol-Myers Squibb/Otsuka America’s Abilify, GlaxoSmithKline’sAdvair, Merck’s Propecia and Pfizer’s Viagra and Lipitor—spent almost $60million per TNS Media Intelligence.
From the April 01, 2008 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
