Pharma Marketing News Vol. 10, No. 3: 17 FEBRUARY 2011

Vol. 10, Issue No. 3: 17 FEBRUARY 2011 – EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Welcome to Volume 10, Issue No. 3 (17 February 2011) of Pharma Marketing News. See the featured article summaries below.

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CONTENTS
(Click on titles to see a summary and link to each article)

• Good Promotion Practices Alliance
• Breaking the 140-character Limit of Twitter Opens the Door to FDA-Compliant Branded Tweets
• FDA’s Abrams Spends 4 Minutes Discussing Social Media Guidance at ePharma Summit!
• The Socialisation of the Internet is Bogus
• GSK’s U.S. Sales Reps “Europeanized”: No Longer Rewarded for Ability to Push Prescriptions

Article Summaries

Good Promotion Practices Alliance
Prolifiq and Reprints Desk Team Up to Offer Compliance Solutions

Pharmaceutical marketing fraud and abuse has been a hot topic for Congressional oversight and has helped the US Department of Justice (DOJ) earn $17 for every dollar spent on enforcement from FY2007-FY2009. That’s a return on investment any marketer would be proud of.

There is plenty of attention being paid to these cases in blogs such as Pharma Marketing Blog and in the general media. Most of this attention, however, has been critical of the industry and has served to ex-pose the problems. But there hasn’t been much attention paid to good compliance solutions or best practices. That’s the mission of the Good Promotion Practices Alliance (GPP), which is co-sponsored by Reprints Desk and Prolifiq Software.

Topics include:

• About Reprints Desk and Prolifiq
• FDA’s Good Reprint Practices
• The Compliance How-to Gap
• The GPP Mission Statement
• GPP Blog
• Resources for Good Promotional Practices
• 5 Short and Sweet Tips for Content Review

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Breaking the 140-character Limit of Twitter Opens the Door to FDA-Compliant Branded Tweets
“Say Hi to longer posts with Deck.ly” Deck.ly is a new technology that allows Twitter posts much longer than the standard 140 characters. Deck.ly is currently available for TweetDeck, the desktop, Android, and Google Chrome. It will soon be available on the iPhone and iPad.

Deck.ly has enormous potential for pharmaceutical marketers who have been chaffing at the bit to post meaningful branded messages via Twitter but who have been stymied by lack of guidance from FDA regarding how to provide fair balance within the 140-character limit of Twitter.

Using TweetDeck, for example, you can post a 477-character tweet that is compliant with current FDA regulations and guidelines.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/DECKlyFDA’s Abrams Spends 4 Minutes Discussing Social Media Guidance at ePharma Summit!
Tom Abrams, the Head of FDA’s Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications (DDMAC), apparently believes Twitter and YouTube are passing fads.

During his presentation at the 2011 ePharma Summit in NYC, Abrams said FDA would NOT “do guidance on specific technology platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. Those things are really big now, but you know what, two years from now who knows what the next thing [will be]?” Abrams also pooh-poohed Groupon

Meanwhile, both Google and Facebook (valued at $50 billion) are courting Twitter, which so far has rebuffed their offers to purchase the company. According the the WSJ, people familiar with the matter say potential suitors put an estimated valuation of Twitter “in the neighborhood of $8 billion to $10 billion.”

Abrams devoted exactly 4 MINUTES of his 45-minute presentation to “Social media in prescription drug promotion”!!! In contrast, Abrams spent about 7 minutes on TV drug promotion regulation.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/DDMAC4minThe Socialisation of the Internet is Bogus
The whole web is now socialised…” said Alex Butler in a pharmaphorum interview. Alex does NOT mean that socialists have taken over the Internet, although, if you think about it … hmmm. I digress…

“We live in a post-advertising age where messages no longer resonate without dialogue, and where information is best exchanged through community,” said Butler. “But although it is tempting to think that contact is now king, in fact high value dynamic content, valued by the consumer, has never been more important…there is little of value on the internet that is not socialised in some form, even if it is just the capacity to comment and share. So how as an industry can we influence the exchange of ideas and information if we are not prepared to be where our audience and communities exist?”

Read more here: http://bit.ly/smbogus
GSK’s U.S. Sales Reps “Europeanized”
According to the Financial Times, “GlaxoSmithKline will this month scrap payments to its US-based commercial staff based on individual sales targets, as it attempts to draw a line under past aggressive marketing practices that have incurred substantial fines”.

GSK’s sales “reps” will no longer receive commissions “based on their ability to push prescriptions. They will instead be paid based on their scientific knowledge, feedback from customers and the performance of their business unit.”

This seems to be a radical shift in the evolution of the pharma sales model.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/EUREP