Marissa Miley and Rich Thomaselli reported in Ad Age last week that “Big Pharma is lumbering into the digital realm, using a growing chunk of its $4.7 billion DTC dollars to reach patients and prescribers on blogs, Twitter and YouTube.”
While this might not seem newsworthy to most, according to the article “Big Pharma Finally Taking Big Steps to Reach Patients With Digital Media” is big news to anyone following the adoption of social media in the Pharma space. Miley and Thomaselli found that “Johnson & Johnson keeps a respected and popular blog; Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim and AstraZeneca all use Twitter to deliver news about their respective companies; and most recently, Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca each launched branded YouTube channels to reach certain patient groups.”
Why has it taken Big Pharma so long to begin to adopt social media? Mark Senak, senior VP at Fleishman Hillard and author of the blog, Eye on FDA is quoted in the article, “They’re late to the game because no one wants to get a warning letter.”
Miley and Thomselli write:
To further illustrate the complexities of a digital world without clear DTC guidelines, it took AstraZeneca more than eight months of meetings with a team of 15 to 20 company experts from the regulatory, legal, compliance, corporate, and brand management departments before it put up a YouTube channel for its asthma drug Symbicort. “The social-media space is very much a gray area,” said Dana Settembrino, senior brand communications manager for the drug. “In that sense it makes it challenging.”
The good news is that Big Pharma is taking steps to engage their customers that will hopefully in the end benefit their customers around the world that are suffering from health problems. You can read the entire article here.