Merck is Shocked -- Shocked! -- to Discover That Some Drug Ads Are "Deceptive"

(MoneyWatch)  Merck (MRK) wants the FDA to know that its own rules on risk information in drug ads have actually made patients less likely to encounter safety information. Of course, Merck's agenda here is to persuade the FDA to loosen up its oversight of online advertising -- so take its conclusions with a pinch of salt.

Merck outlined its argument in a letter to the FDA in which it claimed that unbranded "help-seeking" ads targeted at patients who simply want to know more about their disease don't work and are "potentially deceptive." Companies have relied heavily on unbranded ads in part because the FDA places less scrutiny on them -- precisely because they don't make specific claims about drugs. Merck claimed to reach its conclusion after doing a study that showed consumers respond the least to unbranded health awareness ads, and are less likely to find drug safety information through them.

For years, pharma companies have argued that drug advertising is good for us because it gets more sick people to the doctor. To burnish this point, companies have spent millions running unbranded health awareness ads which urge patients to call a number or visit a web site to research their health problems. Although the ads don't push specific pills, the belief is that patients will end up at their doctor requesting prescriptions anyway.

Pfizer (PFE), for instance, made a huge policy shift in 2005, promising that the money it spent on unbranded health ads would be "on par" with the money it placed behind specific ads for its name-brand pills. That year it began a new campaign for cholesterol drug Lipitor with a series of unbranded efforts urging consumers to "get the facts" about the danger of high cholesterol.

But, Merck says in a letter in which it asks the FDA to update its drug advertising rules, that was all a waste of money. Worse, these ads are slightly unethical, Merck hints:

... they may lack transparency. An individual searching for information on depression, for example, may view a sponsored help-seeking ad as confusing or worse, potentially deceptive, if the link provided redirects to a company-sponsored product web site instead of a disease-specific web site.

Merck's study found that consumers are least likely to click on unbranded ads and therefore least likely to reach the warnings and side effect information that the FDA wants people to read in ads. In addition, consumers were least likely to agree that unbranded ads were a "direct way" to reach safety information:

(Click to enlarge.) Merck did the study after the FDA's 2009 crackdown on branded online search ads, mostly in Google. Those ads -- which offer a dozen or so words and a hyperlink -- contained a few words touting brands and almost no words describing risks, which is why the FDA wanted them gone. Merck and its rivals were forced to replace them with unbranded health ads:

Across several brands, we observed an increase in click-thru rates with the unbranded, help-seeking format indicating that the format may have attracted more users seeking condition-specific information.

However, the number of landing (product) site pages consumed after the click-thru consistently declined. For one brand, the number of page views by the searcher dropped by nearly 50%.

Merck's takeaway -- what's good for our brands is good for patients, too -- is a conclusion that the FDA may want to treat skeptically.

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