It’s a shame the FDA hasn’t come out with clear rules on what pharmaceutical companies can and can’t do online when it comes to marketing their products. They have created an environment where pharmaceutical companies recognize the value of digital media and want to get involved, but need to act with extreme caution since they don’t know what might get them in trouble with the regulatory agency.
As PR Week points out, pharmaceutical companies have been buying “sponsored links” with search engines for years that show up when someone searches for a disease or medical condition. Usually the text descriptions of these links don’t or can’t give much information away, reading something like, “Learn about symptoms and treatments for (insert disease here).” Fair balance information, of course, would be included once someone clicked through the link.
In a somewhat confusing move, however, the FDA sent warning letters to many of the big players in the pharma space, claiming they failed to “provide the proper risk information.” This is an additional example showing that comprehensive rules for how pharma can legally participate online are long overdue:
But as more pharmaceutical companies become involved in social media, the FDA will have a responsibility to better define the regulatory parameters of the digital space, including paid keyword advertising, wikis, Twitter, and YouTube. Lacking a policy that detailed how to adopt these rules for the Web, companies followed the one click ad hoc system, which they’ve now been punished for and had taken off the table.
The fact that the FDA hasn’t adopted such rules isn’t fair to pharmaceutical companies, and isn’t helping patients, who may very well be missing out on valuable medical information they could use to educate themselves.
(Full disclosure: I work at Edelman, a PR firm, and do work on behalf of pharmaceutical clients.)
Google’s throwing a wrench into the IE vs. Firefox vs. Safari vs. Opera browser dynamic with it’s own offering, Google Chrome. They explain their reasoning behind the project in a