It was during yet another sixteen-hour ad agency day that I first heard a weary co-worker refute the idea of staying even later with the claim of “this is advertising, we’re not savin’ lives here!”; yet VAB’s analytics of the last four years of Pharma brands on the Multiscreen TV ad platform reveal those ads to arguably be doing exactly that – providing an irreplaceable discovery-to-remedy role that includes “saving lives” among ailment sufferers and patients of serious & invasive diseases.
The 2025 questions about Pharma TV ads (including a potential ban) led to our deep dive into 58 Pharma TV ad campaign launches from 2021 thru mid-2024, including tracking mid-funnel outcomes (weekly search volume, etc.) for many new prescription remedies. Our first round of insights included:
- Some of the largest Pharma TV ad spenders, and those with the largest increases (’23 to ’24), are combatting serious health threats: Cancer, COPD, Obesity, RSV & Depression.
- After FDA ‘approval to market,’ the 58 new Pharma brands exhausted Digital & Social advertising for an average of twenty-three months before launching a TV campaign. The count of sufferers going to Google Search during those average first two years (without TV ads) amounts to a relatively modest pace of sufferers seeking remedy.
- Then Pharma TV ad campaign launches drove huge, immediate spikes in Google Search traffic, typically achieving 3x to 6x more searches in the first week of TV ad launches, motivating exponentially more sufferers to quickly seek info & remedies. These big search spikes occurred immediately in 85% of Pharma TV launches over the 3.5 years, and the much higher TV-generated search levels were sustained as the “new normal”.
- Site traffic (monthly uniques) to Pharma parent company sites also spiked immediately – +80% higher on average by 2024 versus prior non-TV or less TV years.
- Most gratifying was the exponential change in the scale of sufferers that took remedy actions from TV ads – with heavier TV viewers displaying much greater propensity (vs. overall adult population) to opt into the “discovery-to-remedy” cycles: +39% more likely to take a remedy-seeking action and +56% more likely to discuss a remedy ad with a doctor.
Also Read: The Age of Streaming and How Marketers Can Stay Ahead
Given all the search & site traffic data showing TV as the primary driver of mid-funnel actions at scale for Pharma remedies, the prescription category’s 2024 ad spending split by major media is counter-intuitive: with Digital/Social getting $19.5 billion (73% of total) and TV getting a fraction of that at $7 billion (27% total).
Further compounding Pharma’s mis-aligned (on performance) ad spend split? TV’s full transparency and 24/7 compliance to five crucial FDA standards for Pharma ads (updated in 2024) is plain for all to see, but not so for the $4 billion in Pharma ads on Social, which is a compliance mystery, at best – with unclear guidelines, out-of-date policies, and lack of warnings.
In clicking through our full report on Pharma advertising (“Dedicated to Your Good Health”) you are likely to ask yourself the most obvious question about the potential of increased scrutiny on Pharma TV ads:
- How could the 27% of the ad spend (TV) that is inspiring exponentially more sufferers to seek remedies and doctor’s appointments, while doing so in a fully FDA compliant and fully transparent ad platform… somehow be seen as a “problem” versus a champion for those most in need of real remedies?
Turns out my agency friend was wrong – (TV) Advertising is “Savin’ lives here.”
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