In January, I pointed out that drug companies that place product videos on YouTube leave themselves open to association with other videos that poke fun at them, or worse, encourage consumers to join class action lawsuits against the company. The case that I pointed out was the YAZ Birth Control Channel (see "The Trouble with YouTube: YAZ Case Study").
The problem is that you cannot control what other videos may be highlighted by YouTube when your video is played OUTSIDE the channel. In the case of YAZ, for example, when you click on "related videos," what you see are many videos from law firms suing Bayer and spoofs of YAZ TV commercials. Even though Bayer has turned off comments, it cannot prevent viewers from seeing these related videos.
According to an article in AdAge, YouTube may have fixed this problem.
"Enter YouTube's latest feature, 'target excludes,' launching as part of the site's Video Targeting Tool, which gives advertisers the choice to exclude as few as one video they don't want their product associated with as well as specific genres and channels. The feature addresses the most often-criticized aspect of YouTube: You can buy video there, but you never know what you'll get" (see "YouTube Launches Brand Protection Feature").
Today, I revisited the YAZ channel and was greeted with "YazBirthControlPill has no videos available." See image of blank channel below.
It may only be a coincidence that this channel is now blank. Perhaps Bayer has taken down the videos as it looks into using YouTube's new feature? Considering ALL the anti-YAZ videos on YouTube, it must be a monumental task to track them all down and add them to the exclusion list one-by-one. I wonder if there's a app for that?
But there's an even more dangerous problem than contamination relating to OTC medication for children: incorrect dosing.
"There is an urgent need to review the use of children's over-the-counter medicines by parents," said Dr Rebekah Moles, University of Sydney, as part of her research, which concluded that many parents are incapable of giving their children the correct dose of liquid medicines.
As reported by BBC: "Dr Moles said that almost half of the 119,000 calls received by the New South Wales Poisons Information Centre, which handles emergency calls from across Australia, concerned accidental overdose in children, with 15% needing hospitalisation."
I am getting excited about presenting at the upcoming DigiPharm Europe 2010 conference in London at the end of September mostly because I will be meeting several pharma people who are doing digital marketing in Europe! One of these people is Alex Butler who is Digital Strategy and Social Media Manager at Janssen-Cilag.
You can tell that Alex is immersed in communication and social media just be looking at his email signature, which I reproduce below (without revealing his personal phone and email address):
I need to update my sig file to look more like this!
I first learned about Alex when I asked people to nominate candidates for the Pharmaguy Social Media Award (learn more about that here).
Alex's signature says it all, or ALMOST all. There is a lot more to learn about Alex and what he is doing over there in the UK! To learn more about Alex and the other speakers at the DigiPharm Europe 2010 conference, I invited them to participate in my Pharma Marketing BlogTalkRadio show on September 8, 2010. See "DigiPharm's EU ePharma Pioneers: Doing More with Less" for more information about listening to and participating in that show.
My presentation, entitled "New Rules for New Media: A Funny Think Happened While Waiting for FDA Guidance", will be on Thursday, September 30 (see here).
If you were expecting the movie "Love and Other Drugs" to be a hard-hitting expose of pharmaceutical sales tactics as was the book it's loosely based on -- ie, "Hard Sell," by Jamie Reidy (see review here; use code 'JAMIE' to get it FREE! -- then you are in for a surprise. The trailer (see below) exposes that this is just another "love story" that happens to feature pharmaceutical sales reps and their shenanigans.
"[Anne] Hathaway portrays Maggie, an alluring free spirit who won’t let anyone - or anything - tie her down. But she meets her match in Jamie ([Jake] Gyllenhaal), whose relentless and nearly infallible charm serve him well with the ladies and in the cutthroat world of pharmaceutical sales. Maggie and Jamie’s evolving relationship takes them both by surprise, as they find themselves under the influence of the ultimate drug: love."
The "ultimate drug" may be "love," but the movie seems to focus on how great a drug Viagra is!
Xyrem -- Jazz Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s narcolepsy drug -- is safe and effective, said FDA, which is weighing whether to approve the drug for treating fibromyalgia. Xyrem's active ingredient is Gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), a chemical linked to date rape (see "Date Rape Drug May Soon Be Approved for Fibromyalgia!").
Just what the world needs -- another drug to treat Fibromyalgia! Fibromyalgia is "a poorly understood pain condition which is believed to affect three to six million Americans, mostly women," according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.
It appears that PAIN -- even "poorly understood" pain -- is the holy grail of indications for a variety of drugs seeking a boost in sales. Not only are we becoming a nation of people suffering more pain than any other, we are allowing dangerous drugs onto the market and NOT adequately policing their illegal use and abuse.
You only have to look at how Oxycontin is being abused by our children to realize that these drugs are very profitable to physicians who are engaged in illegal trafficking. Because there will always be unscrupulous physicians who distribute these drugs illegally, no "restricted distribution program," no matter how onerous, will prevent these drugs from reaching our children.
We certainly don't need GHB (aka Xyrem) promoted heavily on TV as are Cymbalta and Lyrica. It won't be long before every college kid realizes that there is a new and easier way to obtain the date rape drug. It's not easy to obtain a drug to treat narcolepsy from a physician. That condition is so rare and confined to a specific group of people that even an unscrupulous physician would not risk prescribing it too freely. But it is easy to prescribe a drug for fibromyalgia, that anyone can complain to suffer from.
Luckily, fibromyalgia is currently thought to affect mostly women and if many college-age men try to get prescriptions, red flags might go up. However, men's pain is an overlooked marketing target and I predict it won't be long that you'll see men in commercials who suffer from fibromyalgia and encouraged to "see their doctors."
IMHO, the unintended (?) consequence of marketing Xyrem under that scenario is more abuse, more date rape, and more college kids being swept up into our prisons.
One new indication for pain = $500 Million in additional sales!
Once a drug is developed for a single indication, gaining approval for additional indications can be sweet icing on the profit cake.
As an example, take Cymbalta, which was originally approved in 2004 for adults with major depression. Later the FDA granted Lilly, the company that manufactures Cymbalta, approval to market Cymbalta for treating nerve pain in diabetics, GAD (ie, "generalized anxiety disorder"; see "eGAD! How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cymbalta!") and fibromyalgia, a condition characterized by chronic fatigue and muscle and joint pain.
Now, as reported in this Bloomberg article ("Lilly’s Cymbalta Helps Chronic Pain in U.S. Review"), Cymbalta may be approved for chronic lower back and knee pain, an indication that would increase sales by $500 Million, a 16% increase over the $3.07 Bn in sales for Cymbalta in 2009.
Currently, it is estimated that 7% (about $215 Million) of Cymbalta sales comes from "off-label" prescribing for "diseases of the musculoskeletal system, including arthritis and back pain." No doubt this is due in part to stories published two years ago with these headlines:
* "Cymbalta Found To Reduce Chronic Lower Back Pain" * "Patients Taking Cymbalta Experienced Reduced Chronic Low Back Pain in New Study" * "Anti-depressant drug shown to help people with low back pain"
Getting a 7% in sales from off-label prescribing is sweet, but sweeter still is getting an additional 17% from being able to market the drug for a new indication.
This got me to thinking about how much it costs to get a drug approved for a new indication. First of all, it has to be lot less expensive than getting the first indication because no new safety trials have to be run. Of course, new efficacy trials have to be run to "prove" that the drug works to treat the new condition. But these trials are much smaller -- hundreds of patients -- compared to the initial trials that involved thousands of patients.
As I learned when I wrote "The Cymbalta Buzz Machine is at Full Throttle!" the the back pain study, which Lilly may have submitted to the FDA to support Cymbalta's use for chronic pain, involved ONLY 236 patients. That's a pretty small study compared to the size of clinical trials needed for initial approval of a drug for marketing.
Searching Google, I found the cost per patient of running a clinical trial to range from $5,000 to $26,000. I suspect the former number is closer to what Lilly paid for its back pain trial. That would mean that Lilly paid only $1.3 Million to run this trial, for which it stands to gain $500 Million in additional sales.
Subtitle: This Bayer Sexy Youtube Video is Popular, but Will It Help Levitra Sales?
Is viral, peer-to-peer pharma marketing an effective tactic? Jeff Chester, who heads up the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), thinks so. Speaking on NPR's All Things Considered show (summarized on NPR's blog), Chester commented on Bayer's funny "InBedStory" series of YouTube videos and claimed that "the drug company marketers are counting on you to forward the funny video. And," he says, "that's the idea behind all these techniques."
First of all, there was nothing "funny" about the Novartis button, which included this message: "Home - Tasigna (nilotinib) 200 mg capsules." I can't imagine a more uninspiring, absolutely non-viral message! Why would I bother to share that unless I was working for Novartis?
Ah! I think I really hit upon pharma's viral social media strategy -- get your agents, acting like real patients, to spread the word. By agents I mean ad and pr agencies who hire ordinary people to do the dirty work. I believe that this is happening (see "Professional 'Hired Gun' Pharma Tweeters. Is It a Good Idea?").
But Chester's point was that funny, sexy stuff like Bayer's InBedStory videos are popular and easily spread far and wide by ordinary Joes like me. Well, not like me. I am not among the "one in four men" who have ED, which is a claim made in one of Bayer's videos; in another video, the male character claims that "maybe there's a whole army of men out there needing to put more balls into the cannon, so to speak" (BTW, I have issue with these exaggerated ED prevalence claims; see "40over40: Lilly's DTC ED Awareness Campaign in the UK").
The funny thing is, Bayer has shut down practically ALL of the social media, viral functions on its InBedStory Youtube channel. You can't submit comments and you can't embed any of the videos in blogs like this one. So I can't embed Episode #9 ("Sex Tape"), which is by the far the MOST popular video in the series, in this post. But here's a scene from it, which you can click on to get to the Youtube site.
I should mention that you can "Share" InBedStory videos by distributing links to them in Twitter, Blogger, email messages, etc. I guess that counts as viral. It seems, however, that not many people are doing this EXCEPT for the "Sex Tape" video, which has been viewed more than 126,000 times! This video really has no message other than hinting at various ways of having kinky sex (go ahead, have a look!) All the other videos, which are at least educational and have the message to go talk to your doctor, have been viewed only about 1,000 times -- less than 1% of the views racked up by "Sex Tape." In contrast, "Macks' Osso bucco recipe" Youtube video has over 1,100 views (see embedded version at the end of this post).
BTW, there's also an InBed web site. "See one man's journey from droop to Don Juan" is how the site describes the series of videos. You can "Share This Site," but not by using any nifty social media tool -- you just enter some one's name and email address and Bayer sends them a message like this: "Hi, John Mack sends you the following recommendation http://www.in-bed.info/en/index.php" which is pretty enticing. NOT! I spent all morning entering email addresses of everyone I know and I hope they will do the same. Yeah for the latest in viral marketing!
Curiously, the InBed website does NOT include Episode #9 ("Sex Tape"), which is the most viral of all videos in the series!
Even if Bayer allowed viewers to comment on and embed its videos, I doubt that it would help the sales of Levitra. The whole effort is UNBRANDED, except for the Levitra flame logo off to the right of the screen. You'd have to be pretty savvy to know that Bayer markets Levitra. The fact is, these videos may get more men to ask their doctors about ED treatments, but it's likely that the doctor will prescribe Viagra, the number one ED drug, and NOT Levitra (#3 in most markets).
But getting men to see their doctors about their erectile dysfunction problems is a good thing whether it sells more Levitra or not. Maybe some of these men have real underlying, untreated medical problems such as diabetes or hypertension that is causing ED. Unfortunately, only one of the 9 InBed videos I viewed mentioned possible underlying medical conditions (ie, high blood pressure).
So, the most viral aspect of InBedStory (video #9) is the least effective in promulgating Bayer's cause (get men to see their doctors about ED) and is the least promoted video on the official website. This hardly seems like a case in support of Chester's contention that pharmaceutical marketers are "counting" on the viral nature of social media to spread their drug messages.
