TRENTON, N.J._Television ads for the world's top-selling drug, cholesterol fighter Lipitor, are back, six months after Pfizer Inc. pulled them amid charges its use of a celebrity doctor endorser who's never practiced medicine misled the public.
This time, Pfizer is leaving out the celebrity.
In the new ads, the endorser is a talent agent from the San Francisco Bay area who tells viewers he started taking Pfizer's Lipitor after surviving a heart attack last year.
The ads began running Tuesday and will be part of an open-ended national campaign that also includes print ads in newspapers and magazines, said John Sage, head of Pfizer's marketing team for Lipitor.
Lipitor generates more than $12 billion a year in revenue for New York-based Pfizer.
Pfizer had run frequent TV ads from late 2006 until then in which artificial heart inventor Dr. Robert Jarvik endorsed Lipitor, appearing to be giving medical advice. While he holds a medical degree, Jarvik never completed licensing requirements to practice medicine.
Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, pulled the ads in February as members of Congress were investigating and media outlets were reporting on that conflict and Pfizer's use of a stunt double in an ad that showed Jarvik rowing.
"Although it wasn't clearly our intent, the ads created misimpressions and distractions around what we were trying to do," Sage said late last week.
He said the man in the new ad, John Erlendson, is "a real Lipitor patient, who is very representative of people with" cholesterol problems.
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Addendum: 9-9-2008 taken from a pharmaceutical website:
Pharma drops again in public opinion
It's not pleasant company at the bottom of this list. According to a new Harris Interactive poll, only 26 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the drug industry--a record that's even worse than Big Oil, and better only than tobacco companies. It's a low point, following a slow-but-steady decline in consumer opinion.
Fair? That's not the point. The question is, do drugmakers intend to do whatever it takes to reverse the trend? Or should they just accept the dubious honor? Given the challenges pharma faces these days, improving public opinion may not be number one on the priority list.
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Survey: Pharma not a good info source
Remember last month when Merck CEO Dick Clark remarked on Big Pharma's "trust deficit [0]?" Well, here's quantitative evidence of it. A European Commission study found that healthcare professionals and payers are "mostly suspicious" of drugmakers as sources of information about drugs. Nearly half of the responders said pharma has too many conflicts of interest to be appropriate sources of general information on medications.
Some of the responses, however, indicated that if drug companies provided a clear distinction between ads and information, they could be valuable repositories because of their intimate knowledge of their products.
The opinions will be factored into decisions about a proposed code of conduct governing the release of info about pharmaceuticals in the E.U.
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Pharma CEOs mull industry "trust deficit'
We love it when pharma CEOs depart from their usual talking points about financial results and restructurings and pipelines, to wax philosophical on their place in the word. This week, we heard an entire trio musing on the state of the industry: Merck chief Richard Clark, GlaxoSmithKline's putative chief Andrew Witty (photo [1]), and Pfizer's Jeff Kindler (photo [2]). Some choice bits:
- Pharma's equilibrium is "shattered," Witty told the Academy of Medical Sciences this week. To fix it, drug makers need to listen more--and talk more--particularly with drug buyers (about the true value of new meds) and with government. Pharma and regulators are "like two ships missing in the night," he said.
- "There is a trust deficit we have to fix," Merck's Clark told The Star Ledger, when asked about lessons learned from the Vytorin controversy. "I think everyone has a lesson to be learned from this. Drug makers "may have to become more transparent" about their spending and their relationships with docs, he said.
- "There's a lot of public concern about the pharmaceutical industry," Kindler told the Wall Street Journal. "But...everybody recognizes that you can't solve the healthcare reform problem without an innovative, healthy pharmaceutical industry. We have to be a part of the solution." He went on to talk about truth-telling: "It's important for the industry to communicate with integrity and to do everything it can do to insure the integrity of the data and the science."
Sounds like these guys are all picking up on the same vibe: communication, transparency, telling the truth. And that they recognize that the "shattered equilibrium" and "truth deficit" need to be fixed. What will they do to make that happen, that's the question.
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10 reforms for drug advertising
At BrandweekRx, Jim Edwards outlines 10 direct-to-consumer advertising reforms he says are urgently needed to protect consumers from unscrupulous drug advertising. Edwards' recommendations include banning product-placement ads and forcing drug companies to disclose to the SEC how much money they're spending on advertising (companies don't have to say how much is spent promoting a drug, but it's about double the cost of R&D). He also recommends an FDA requirement for head-to-head studies between competing drugs so that doctors can make educated decisions when prescribing medications. Finally, Edwards argues in favor of total transparency of the amount and usage of drug company dollars spent on Continuing Medical Education, along with full disclosure of payments and gifts to doctors.
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