Another day, another meeting

November 20, 2008 – 11:29 am

Just a little note to add to the week before I do the blog review. It’s been a particularly meeting-heavy week, and I was in Princeton Thursday to listen in on a discussion of social media and the pharmaceutical industry. The meeting attendees were mostly ad executives and technology people; the event was an “innovation lab” sponsored by Compass Healthcare Communciations. There were some interesting things said about the use (or non-use) of social media in the pharma industry. Some of it off the record, of course.

The first thing the group focused on was how completely Johnson & Johnson blew it with their “baby sling” ad for Motrin. Once the mom outrage started pouring in, J&J pulled the ad from its Website and from TV, and Kathy Widmer, VP of marketing for McNeil Consumer Healthcare, issued an apology through J&J’s corporate blog. But as Kristin Keller, VP of client services for Compass, and Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive, saw it, J&J did the wrong thing by panicking. “They could have used it as a two-way street for dialogue, but they blew the opportunity,” Mr. Reynolds said.

But two-way communication is something that pharma has a very hard time dealing with. Lawyer Allen Minsk, from Arnall Golden Gregory LLP, talked about some of the regulatory issues pharma companies face when dealing with social media issues. His advice: if a company must set up a brand-related forum, don’t allow the discussion to devolve into open-ended questions about off-label usage, because FDA will not take kindly to it. In fact, the best use a pharma company might derive from social media is being an observer and collector of data, not as a participant.

As another example of pharma social media gone wrong, Mr. Minsk mentioned the ad Ty Pennington did for Shire’s ADHD drug Adderall. (The ad has been taken off of YouTube, but here is the post John Mack made at the Pharma Marketing Blog about the ad and the letter FDA sent about it.) The nonbranded rooster videos Sanofi-Aventis posted for Ambien CR, however, were successful in avoiding FDA censure, Mr. Minsk said.

If someone in a third-party chat room or forum is disseminating inaccurate information about a drug, here is nothing in the law that would prevent a brand manager or someone from a company from making a clarification, Mr. Minsk says. However, the company representative has to be careful about leading the others in the forum to to information that could be implicitly off-label promotion.

In the end, FDA is not going to tell companies how they can push the envelope, Mr. Minsk told us. “What you need to do is keep up, look at what Shire did wrong, what maybe Sanofi did right,” he said. “I can’t give you guys a cheat sheet, you have to see what other people are doing.”

After Mr. Minsk’s talk, Compass executives then had a discussion about social media initiatives about one of their client’s brands. It was fascinating, and I wish I could tell you more about it, but I was allowed to stay so long as all details were kept off the record.

Rich Meyer from World of DTC Marketing wasn’t at this meeting, but he does have the perfect chart that sums up how pharma generally feels about social media.