OpEd by John Mack

At the recent eyeforpharma conference, I rocked the boat a little by suggesting that the percent of the pharma DTC promotional budget devoted to the Internet was a miniscule 1-3% and that this percentage has NOT changed since 1998 when I first heard about it. This topic also was discussed in a recent thread of the PHARMA-MKTING email discussion group.

The interesting thing is that after I made my comments, a veritable flood of opinions were aired about why so little money - compared to TV, for example - is spent on Internet direct-to-consumer marketing.

Product managers, I learned, are not enthusiastic about the Internet and they may view the Web as an awareness medium like TV and print. Early proponents of the Internet may be partly responsible for perpetuating this view. However, the Internet is a poor awareness tool - it's nearly impossible to reach a big enough audience of a particular segment online without a massive ad campaign across multiple sites. For awareness, TV beats the Net hands down.

On the other hand, the Internet is best employed as a relationship management tool. However, building relationships means collecting sensitive personal information. Are pharmaceutical companies really interested in dealing with the privacy issues so they can get serious about patient relationship management on the Net? In my experience, the answer is no. The strategy seems to be to fight privacy laws tooth and nail and to avoid collecting personal health information at any cost. Another problem is the "siloing" of information within pharma, which makes it nearly impossible to comply with best privacy practices.

As far as product managers are concerned, e-business is one less thing they want to worry about. Why bother with lengthy legal and regulatory review and the technical problems of managing data? Product management is a short-tenured job that doesn't reward risk taking behavior. No wonder the Internet is often not on the PM's radar screen.

David Reim of SimStar Internet Solutions stated in a PHARMA-MKTING thread: "… the Internet scares the hell out of some brands who don't know what to say to consumers even if they had a cost-effective way to say it." Pharmaceutical marketers also still view physicians as their main customers and many physicians are critical of pharma's DTC marketing. No doubt this also adds to the fear and reluctance of pharma to take unnecessary risks.

So, while studies show that over 50 million American adults use the Internet for health purposes, various forces are at work preventing pharmaceutical marketers from making a serious investment to reach this audience.

Read related articles in this issue:

• Personalized e-Marketing - How can you create and profit from a customer's lifetime experience?