Doctor I’m Late!
Over the years I have worked with many pharmaceutical companies helping them sell their medicines and cures or their message via the Internet to consumers. Everybody involved knows this is both a moral and legislative minefield but in the right hands a valuable channel to market. Fate has now brought me to the door of the professional pharmaceutical world – trying to persuade HCP’s to recommend or prescribe certain brands of medicines over another. As I lifted the lid on this world I was immediately transported back in time to 2003, not a long time I admit, but in Internet terms, an age.
To put this into context, just after the 2000/2001dot.com crash the internet was licking its wounds and looking for a way to get going again. The catalyst came around 2003 in the form of cost-per-click (CPC) advertising. Thanks to the work of Google and Overture, the old cost-per-mille (CPM) went out the window and with it the unmanageable costs of banner advertising. Now, website owners were only paying the search engines when a visitor had actually arrived at their sites, not when there advert has been “looked at”.
And so, coupled with the broadband boom of 2004 and leaps forward in tracking capabilities, the Internet went stratospheric and people could at last monetise the value of their sites and accurately calculate the return on investment of online advertising spend.
All except the online professional pharmaceutical market that is. Hampered or hiding behind their legacy models and legislative restriction they are still, today, using the old way of doing business. Advertising is still sold by the healthcare publishers on a tenancy basis at exorbitant rates. The interpretation of statistics as to the value of the activity is at best naïve but more often one-eyed. They also still use the practise of blocking out space so others can’t get it. This final point to me sums up the backwards of the sector. To simply block space so that your competitors can’t see it is to entirely miss the point of the Internet. It is not about spending power, it is about choice and user empowerment.
It is true there are only a finite amount of HCP’s in the UK and thus the battle for their attention on the Internet is tougher than its consumer counterpart. But HCP’s are highly intelligent people who use the Internet as much as you or I. To treat them differently, is to open the door to whoever realises first that they are consumers too.
Google is now accelerating its pay-per-action (PPA) advertising model in the UK, where the client only pays based upon a pre-agreed action (purchase, download, registration etc) being made by the visitor. And so the consumer Internet will leave the professional pharmaceutical Internet further in its wake. It will only take one brand manager to work how to truly quantify the value of their online advertising spend to HCP’s and stand up and admit it to the end of year conference for the walls to come tumbling down. Who’s going to go first?
Sam Brownfield
14/07/2007
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