Related Posts
Community Builder
Pro
More Posts
Bowl Leader
Sooo ready for the holiday party on Friday.
Additional Posts in Creatives
How are you concepting during quarantine?
Community Builder
Pro
Bowl Leader
Sooo ready for the holiday party on Friday.
How are you concepting during quarantine?
I haven't worked in pharma but I posed this question to a producer of mine once.
his thoughts on pharma work were as follows. his sister was diagnosed with agressive stage 4 cancer earlier that year. the experimental drug she was put on saved her life. later that year she was able to hold her first grandchild.
we all get cynical about advertising. but sometimes there is a silver lining. don't be too quick to discount pharma.
I've sold a lot of things, but none have actually had a profound impact on someone's life. pharma isn't all bad.
Yes, Fair Balance in pharma ads means that if the ad makes a medical claim, it has to tell you about the most common adverse events that cropped up during the drug’s testing, giving the potential user the full story.
“You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have The Facts of Drugs...The Facts of Drugs...”
I started out in regular advertising, and switched to pharma. My two cents:
It’s natural to think of advertising as inherently deceptive and manipulative. After all, it’s part of the game to exaggerate, stretch, and imagine attributes of products in creative ways. A lot of times, this is what makes advertising fun, and what gives brands personality. We take it for granted in regular advertising.
Understand that when it comes to pharma advertising, all of that absolutely goes out the window. You will never be able to say, suggest, or imply anything about the brand/product that isn’t backed up by clinical data. In fact, most of what you’re going to be producing is regurgitations of cold hard data.
Everything you make goes through a ringer of regulatory reviews. If you’re a copywriter, 80% of adjectives and superlatives are completely off-limits. As an AD, I’ve had concepts kicked back to me because a person featured in the ad was smiling too big, and that was considered an overpromise on the drug’s benefits.
Pharma advertising is regulated as fuck. Unlike regular advertising, it is literally impossible and illegal to overpromise or be dishonest in any way. So if your ethical concern is about misleading people, you don’t have to worry.
And as a result, you’ll find that pharma brands/clients are incredibly self-flagellating. They overcompensate to an insane degree when it comes to being conservative about what they claim. It actually gets frustrating as a creative—even when we try to showcase stories of REAL patients, and how certain therapies have changed their lives—we are instructed by clients to hide how well the drugs really work. They are so afraid of being accused (by competitors, or the FDA) of overpromising.
On the flip side, I’ve recently been seeing mountain dew ads on Twitch claiming that the drink is proven to improve your focus and performance. Literally the thing that gives you diabetes. That’s what unregulated advertising looks like. And that’s not pharma.
On the other hand, if your concern is more that your work might be bland and boring, that’s much more understandable. And I have a bunch of thoughts on that as well.
I love that. Was on set (virtually) with a patient this week, just telling his story. The medicine changed his life, and his words made the doctor on set cry. He cried. We all cried.
This is footage the world will never see (for the reasons I mentioned above), but this is the kind of shit I live for.
We aren't evil people. Pharma gets a bad reputation because of its history of trying to essentially bribe doctors, but those days are long gone. Most of us who do pharma work are at best genuinely interested in patient education, health and wellness, improved outcomes or at worst, just doing our best to do decent work and get a nice paycheck. No malicious intent here and I consider it part of my job to make sure we do our jobs ethically. I've never worked with an agency colleague whose goal was to harm patients, spread dangerous lies, or blatantly misinterpret or misrepresent data. There have only been a few, very rare times in my almost 20 years where I truly felt we were being asked to do work that was highly questionable (typically by terrible upper management clients), and it never made it past the PRC review team, which is responsible for reviewing and approving all materials prior to dissemination or submission to FDA for approval.
Not sure if that helps you with your moral dilemma, but I hope it provides some inside perspective. At the end of the day, if you aren't comfortable with it, don't go for it. Or, look for work in more health and wellness leaning brands, which are less about pushing pharma drugs. Also take a look at Cannes Health work if you haven't already. Lots of work in the unbranded or pro-bono space that are health-related, but not pharma.
This is a great response, thank you so much for your insight on it. I’m still not one for pharma ads, but I do appreciate that the people making them are doing what they can to be ethical in the process.
Bowl Leader
Another thing- if we had universal health care, the pharma ads wouldn’t go away. In fact, having UHC would make them both more legitimate and important. Education is the goal, both for patients and HCPs. If you remove the “profit” angle, then it’s about knowing your data, and science and making the best decision for you. The amount they spend on ads is a drop in the bucket compared to what they would make even under a UHC model.
Bowl Leader
“Moral issues” with what? Helping people become educated about life changing medicines and giving them agency when their doctors are making decisions?
Bowl Leader
Pharma ads are immoral, but I bet you’d do soda ads (poison), candy ads (poison), SUV ads (climate change), beers ads (poison), financial services (wealth inequity), Right? Medicine and science save lives.
Most pharma agencies (or at least the brunt of pharma agency business) don’t advertise to consumers, but to doctors or other medical professionals.
I got over my moral/creatives misgivings quickly enough when I had a growing student loan burden in the middle of a recession and 1000 dollars to my name after I graduated college. It is what it is.
Also, OP, saw one of your replies up above, about saying pharma commercials should be banned and there are better sources of information than a drug ad. I don't disagree; if DTC consumer spots went away, that'd be fine by me. But I also think we underestimate how difficult it truly is for most average Americans to understand health information. Health literacy in the US is incredibly poor. If we remove DTC, we must replace it with a better alternative. We also overestimate a patient's ability to choose, based on seeing a TV commercial. Unless it is over the counter, a patient still needs a prescription and many doctors still don't just give a patient whatever they ask for. The majority of consumer-friendly sources of information out there either comes directly from pharma, is sponsored by pharma, or comes from patient advocacy groups. That's obviously a huge problem, but not one that's borne out of pharma alone. No answers here, but just think this is a really interesting and relevant conundrum.
Whatever you decide, good luck! It really is tough out there.
I’ve been working in pharma for 2 years after 20 years in traditional agencies. I was getting bored selling burgers and coffee but have to say I was deeply skeptical when accepting this job. But it’s been great. I’m learning A TON. Working with really smart people that understand science. Pharma is a huge challenge creatively as the sandbox is a lot smaller. (Also, I’m in Canada so it’s much more restrictive than the US market). I haven’t so far felt like my moral or ethical compass was ever pushed in a direction where I felt icky.
Easy to hate on the pharmaceutical industry. It’s much more difficult to figure out how innovation would happen in the world without it.
Subject Expert
I tend to agree with OP’s reservations as I come from a country where consumer facing pharma advertising is illegal.
Beyond that though, there is another issue I recently became aware of. I have a friend who took a role on pharma after being laid off from a job in a consumer agency. In every briefing she is given background on how each drug was tested. Many are tested on animals. She is an animal lover and struggles with this side of the job.
It’s a category. I have a moral conflict with anything that supports the military industrial complex. Yet a lot of agencies that service these brands service other stuff I’m OK with. It’s the same in health.
As someone with a chronic illness who relies on all of these pharmaceuticals to live my life, I’ve sworn to never work in Pharma. While these drugs improve my quality of life immensely, I feel like I would be contributing to an industry that’s taking advantage of people’s illnesses.
The only reason I need a corporate job is so I have health insurance to cover meds that are “worth” nearly $10k/month. I’m well aware of my privilege in having health insurance that will actually cover these therapies.
I don’t condemn anyone who works in Pharma. Jobs are hard to find, but that’s my two cents as someone who has relied on all these ridiculously-priced drugs we’ve seen on TV ads (Xeljanz, Humira, Orencia, Enbrel, Actemra, Arava, Plaquenil) to get up and work my 9-5 so I can afford my drugs.
Do you think the world doesn’t deserve prescription medicines? Do you think people don’t deserve to know about them? Then by all means, don’t go into pharma.