If you’ve turned on your TV anytime in the last, oh, decade or so, you’ve no doubt been bombarded by ads imploring you to “ask your doctor” about Drug X. And you’re well familiar with the routine: You get treated to happy images of folks dancing, perhaps, or walking their dogs in pretty green meadows, while a soothing voice in the background tells you that Drug X may cause you to lose your ability to drive safely, lose your vision, or lose your mind.
Forgive the exaggeration but you get the picture.
Well, the FDA isn’t pleased with the pharmaceutical industry’s advertising practices. So it’s proposing a new set of rules that would not only limit the ability of drug advertisers to use so many cheerful images, but may indeed force them to place more emphasis on their products’ potential side effects.
The FDA actually proposed the new rules back in 2010. But it re-opened the matter to public comment on January 27, after it published the results from an experiment it sponsored to measure the impact of distraction on consumers’ ability to understand the risks and benefits of drugs being advertised. The rules would pertain to direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads for prescription drugs on television or radio.
The original proposal is rather bulky. But here are the basics of what the FDA is suggesting: The agency wants to amend the rules for DTC advertising to more clearly define the standards for determining whether side effects are presented in a “clear, conspicuous, and neutral manner.” For example, the new guidelines would dictate that the adds cannot include “distracting representations,” such as statements, images, or sounds that might draw the audience’s attention away from those laundry lists of potentially adverse events.
So what exactly makes an ad distracting? The FDA’s proposal doesn’t really spell it out clearly, but you can get a hint of what the agency was thinking in the newly released report on its study, which it titled, “Experimental Evaluation of the Impact of Distraction on Consumer Understanding of Risk and Benefit Information in Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Television Advertisements.” The FDA planned the study to answer a number of questions. Among them: Do visual images that are positive in tone affect viewers’ ability to comprehend the risks inherent in a product? Do positive images influence how people feel about the product? And if the advertiser super-imposes text onto the images—spelling out the side effects—does that change how viewers perceive the product?
All good questions, to be sure. To answer them, the FDA asked 2,000 consumers to go online and watch an ad for a fake blood-pressure drug called Zintria. But the participants didn’t all see the same ad. Some heard the side effects cited while watching “mildly” positive images (rocks, chairs, metal arches), while others saw “strongly” positive images (babies, puppies, girls jumping with beach balls). Some viewers saw the side effects spelled out in superimposed text, while others didn’t.
Not surprisingly, those who watched cute babies and puppies while hearing about the side effects felt better overall about the product than those who watched the more boring images. Both groups, however, understood Zintria’s risks just fine—and they really got it when the side effects were displayed on the screen in clear text, too.
The FDA has published the study on the Web and re-opened the proposed rules to comments, which the public can submit up until February 27 (instructions below).
We here at Xconomy are plenty distracted by the plethora of peppiness in drug advertising. Here are our votes for
