DTC Special Feature 2020: It’s alive!

For all the digital and interactive tools that keep popping up, television remains the DTC marketer’s old reliable.

Has pharma DTC marketing gotten geekier? Of course it has. Brands are using artificial intelligence to target, creating interactive virtual reality experiences, finding high-tech ways to touch the patient at all steps in her journey.

And yet, pharma’s favorite old reliable high-dollar, low-tech tool keeps crackling along. The industry’s top five brands by spend totaled $1.37 billion in TV advertising in 2019, an increase of 16.4 percent. For all its relative cost versus digital tools and lack of close targeting capability, the couch in the living room is going to continue to be an important part of the patient journey for the foreseeable future.

“I believe that television will always remain a significant platform for DTC as the research continues to prove its ability to drive ROI, support other channels, and quickly set the tone for a brand’s campaign,” says Mary Brown, senior VP and managing director of Ogilvy Health. “In addition to the big spenders, we continue to see brands and disease states with limited populations engaged in this broadest of mediums.”

That said, the way that brand managers are using television has changed, alongside how viewers are consuming it.

“The proliferation of viewing options doesn’t dilute effectiveness,” Brown told Med Ad News. “Instead, it provides opportunities to tailor our campaigns effectively and efficiently. And streaming platforms, OTT, and video in general align with the changing dynamics of how people seek information and entertainment. In my own experience we’ve seen time and again how television/video exponentially enhances our digital, interactive, and social efforts. We’ve been hearing about the demise of television for years as digital opportunities continue to grow, but it shouldn’t be an either/or proposition.”

Who’s been doing the best at TV? Brown is a fan of the Cosentyx “Real people, real results” campaign, particularly its “Project Runway” tie-in.

“The patients come off as very real, very natural, and their stories are engaging,” she says. “It’s very easy to make an emotional connection with them, even if you don’t share the same condition. The thing that elevated the campaign for me was the tie-in they did with the show Project Runway. Cyndi Lauper, a Cosentyx patient featured in the campaign, was also a guest judge on an episode. In that same episode, Cyndi did an unbranded interstitial video focusing on why, because of her psoriasis, fabric texture and feel is so important to her and is a factor in the fashion she chooses for herself. The placement was not forced in any way, and coupled with the branded Cosentyx spots throughout the episode, really brought the message full circle and reinforced the brand’s commitment to its patients. Product placement is a tricky marketing concept in the world of pharma, but these marketers pulled it off tastefully and effectively.”

This sort of portrayal, Brown believes, is a step in the right direction, and away from one of the ruts of DTC – formulaic, nondescript characters.

“For years, many DTC ads have fallen victim to a very formulaic approach,” Brown told Med Ad News. “Problem, unhappy patient, introduce treatment option, fair balance, ask your doctor if X is right for you, the result being uninspiring presentations that didn’t engage viewers and fell short of an important objective of DTC advertising: to engage patients to help them make better choices about their health. Over the past year or so I’ve been encouraged by the portrayal of patients in more realistic, everyday situations, “patients” delivering fair balance information rather than some anonymous voiceover, and more colloquial language used in copy (e.g., Xofluza’s message: ‘The flu sucks … the life out of you’).”

For Mike Lodge, senior omnichannel strategist at Cambridge BioMarketing, the best DTC TV campaign of late came from one of Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim’s diabetes blockbusters.

“The Jardiance ‘On It’ campaign is one that I think strategically connects the DTC TV spot to the customer experience on the site,” Lodge told Med Ad News. “The product page continues to reinforce the drug’s ability to lower A1C in type 2 diabetes and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. The site contains an interactive quiz that reinforces diet, exercise, and making changes in daily life. In addition, the site has a customizable doctor discussion guide that allows the patient to select the items that are most important to them. All this engagement and interactivity on the website provides a wealth of data that can be used to better understand the needs and beliefs of the users and deliver more tailored messaging based on where they may be in their journeys.”

So what is next for DTC? Well, the good news is that television is not just for high-priced carpet-bombing any more. According to Lodge, improvements in attribution models and data integration will continue to give brand marketers an improved understanding of how television impacts other channels such as search and allow marketers to attribute prescriptions to the channel. “I expect a shift from linear TV to OTT (over the top) and addressable TV, which allows for building custom audience targeting versus program targeting. This is especially true in the current stay-at-home/social distancing environment,” Lodge says.

Mary Brown of Ogilvy takes a similar view. “It used to be, and not that very long ago, that we would target our patients/consumers based on patient types borne out of extensive segmentation research and created with a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. These segments helped inform our messaging and provided a focus for ad placement, but now pale in comparison to the targeting opportunities we have across all media. Even television targeting has advanced to the point where we can deliver customized messages based on information gleaned from a number of sources. The advances in DMPs have also allowed us to mine our customer databases to provide patients and consumers with appropriate messages, offers, and programs to help drive compliance and adherence.”