Pharma still uneasy about getting social
October 23, 2009 – 3:51 pmThis week was full and frantically busy, and I am not just talking about the three days I drove back and forth to Bridgewater, N.J., for ExL Pharma’s Digital Pharma conference (if you want the quick lowdown on what happened there, you can find the Tweets, from me and many others, under the hashtag #DigPharm). This week, AstraZeneca offered a buyout to all of its sales representatives (and Pharmalot broke the news); Pfizer started handing out layoffs to most of the former Wyeth sales force; FDA sent a warning letter to King Pharmaceuticals over two video news releases about the pain drug Embeda; the Government Accountability Office released a report that says FDA doesn’t debar researchers quickly enough when they have been found to have conflicts of interest (another hat tip here to Ed Silverman and Pharmalot); FDA has delayed its decision on whether to approve Amgen’s denosumab; and drugmakers were found to be the biggest contributors to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Pharma still having an uneasy time with social media
The ultimate upshot of the Digital Pharma conference this week was there are many people within pharma companies who would like to engage in social media initiatives, but the very thought is still giving med/reg/legal people fits. Consultant Kevin Nalts tackles this attitude in this humorous video he produced for Johnson & Johnson’s Heidi Youngkin.
John Mack also commented on the dichotomy, saying the pharma social media Crips and the legal/regulatory Bloods need to call a peace conference. “When I asked, ‘Are they any legal/regulatory people here?’, no one raised their hands,” he observes. “Maybe they were there but afraid to expose themselves to such a hostile group or – much more likely – they just were not there. … Unless these two pharma gangs can discuss and resolve their differences (ie, by sending representatives to a social media ‘peace’ conference), we’re not making any progress. And I don’t think any guidance from the FDA will make a bit of difference …”
Still, the conference was significant in several ways, especially for moving out of the normal pharma conference comfort zones into the “unconference” format, observed Steve Woodruff of Impactiviti. “For those not familiar with the pharmaceutical industry, the air we breathe there is full of centralized, controlled, regulated, measured, one-way communications,” he says. “Get the picture? We’re still in the evangelistic phase of encouraging social media adoption, and you can imagine that the informality of an unconference approach might be just a bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, a growing group of passionate early adopters has banded together (on-line and off-line) to try to move the industry into this century.”
Jonathan Richman of Bridge Worldwide, who blogs at Dose of Digital, concludes that pharma overcomplicates social media. “While there are a lot of objections and concerns within pharma companies when it comes to social media, the one I hear most often and that really bugs me is about the internal regulatory/legal process,” Mr. Richman says. But pharma companies aren’t refusing to take calls from their call centers, nor do sales reps have to pre-clear a response to a physician, he observes.
“Obviously, we don’t make our call center representatives or sales reps wait for our regulatory process to review their answers before responding to a customer’s question, so why would we have to do this to respond to a customer question on our company blog?” Mr. Richman says. “Do we trust our sales reps more than the person responsible for our blog? Do call center people get a special set of rules?”
Ellen Hoenig Carlson, in Advance MarketWorx’s Notes from the Back of the Book blogs, picked up on a term from a presentation done by J&J’s Marc Monseau: guard rails. “Guard rails can help provide a ’safety net’ to pharma social media tactics and those running them by helping to insure that clear and simple guidelines are set up around certain areas to help frame conversation and engagement, and to keep social media efforts on safe regulatory and legal ground,” she says.
Blogger Mark Senak of Eye on FDA, who was on the regulatory panel at the conference, ponders whether the FDA hearing on social media in November will actually bring on a global freezing. “Will the fact that so much time will pass before FDA gets its job done mean that pharmaceutical and other medical products companies will hold back their involvement in social media even though their most valuable asset - their brand - is being shaped there more than in any other medium?” he wonders. “And that while patients turn increasingly to the Internet and to social networks for healthcare information upon which they act, the actual companies that have done years of research on medicines will be absent from the discussion? ” According to Mr. Senak, “that really can’t happen,” and that the industry needs an interim feedback mechanism from the FDA.
Around and about ….
Jim Edwards at Bnet reviews the numbers of the combined Pfizer-Wyeth. “The revenue yield on every dollar the new company spends on sales and marketing is $3.53, a little less than what both companeis make now — meaning that in the near-term both Pfizer and Wyeth would have been more efficient had they not done this merger at all,” he says, but qualifies the statement by adding that most of the merger-related cuts haven’t begun yet. (I have private confirmation that the sales rep cuts began Tuesday; those on the Wyeth board at Cafe Pharma would are expressing their pain.)
Also from Bnet this week: Mr. Edwards comments on lower Viagra sales, the fact that a NAMI board member was a paid consultant for AstraZeneca’s Seroquel, that animal rights activists won’t believe Novartis’ denials that it is a customer of Huntingdon Life Sciences, and shares comments from AstraZeneca sales reps about the buyout offer; Trista Morrison says FDA’s delay on denosumab may not be bad as it seems and has a prime real-life example of how not to write a biotech press release; and Mr. Edwards snarks on FDA’s warning letter to King about the Embeda videos.
Among many things this week at Pharmalot, Ed Silverman reports how Novartis is facing a trial in a sex discrimination suit filed by female sales reps (which followed the news that the company was found guilty in a trial for denying Zometa risks); picks up Fortune’s interview with Merck CEO Dick Clarke; shows that pharma’s D.C. lobbying is up; reveals that Bristol-Myers Squibb is closing an Indiana facility; highlights a Democratic congresswoman’s statement that Pfizer should be denied any federal funding; and shows how Merck is embracing transparency.
Mark Senak at Eye on FDA examines FDA’s strategic plan for risk communication.
Sally Church at the Pharma Strategy Blog continues with her view of the future of the pharmaceutical business. She’s rather down on the Pfizer merger particulars that she has heard from the interviews of CEO Jeff Kindler. “It made me wonder if Pfizer have been listening to too many big management consultants and doing those grand (and very expensive) corporate organisation reviews, yet people forget that the consultants who do the project work are often kids out of college with plenty of business school theory and little industry knowledge,” she says. Ms. Church also reminds us that the real heroes of the pharma industry are the patients.
Dr. Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline has his own theories of what Pfizer will look like in a year. “…what might be refreshing is an admission that big mergers – drag-on-for-months-am-I-going-to-still-be-here mergers - come with an acute productivity penalty no matter what. I may have missed it, but I don’t recall hearing anyone from Pfizer say anything like ‘Although we know that this is going to be a huge disruption, we think that in the end it’ll be worth it.’ No, it always seems to be the Day One, hit-the-ground-running, now-the-synergy-starts stuff, which is just not in sync with reality,” he says.
Dr. Howard Brody of Hooked: Ethics, Medicine, and Pharma, says some things do not go well with Coke.
At DrugWonks, Peter Pitts comments on the bill from Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., to eliminate the federal tax deduction on all advertising and marketing expenses for prescription drugs (needless to say, Mr. Pitts is not for it).
Dr. Daniel Carlat at the Carlat Psychiatry Blog was quite happy to see the New York Times covering the issue of industry-funded CME. He estimates that “at least half, probably more, of all industry funded psychiatry CME will also need the retraction treatment. … The best and simplest solution would be to end industry funding of medical education altogether.”
Steve Niles at the Med Ad News Insider Blog describes how Publicis Selling Solutions is working with Aptilon to deliver virtual sales reps.
