The industry trade group is going to examine sales and marketing practices, according to Advertising Age. “In a number of states across the country, there is backlash building against sales and marketing,” Ken Johnson, PhRMA’s senior vp, tells the mag.

“This isn’t five years ago. There are new challenges with respect to safety, to sales and marketing, to a wide range of issues. We represent some very smart people that recognize the world doesn’t stand still. We’ve engaged our companies in looking at sales and marketing practices. We’re also reaching out to patients, hospitals, doctors, health-care providers and others to get their input on how to address some of their concerns with respect to current marketing practices.”

But he stopped short of calling PhRMA’s move a task force or committee. “I’m not going to get into that, whether it’s a task force or this or that. These are all internal discussions,” Johnson harumphs, while also declining to comment on whether there is a goal or timeframe involved.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, the move follows the Vytorin controversy. Merck and Schering-Plough pulled TV ads for their cholesterol med after a study found that the pill doesn’t reduce plaque in neck arteries, although LDL cholesterol was lowered. But Congress and the New York attorney general are reviewing the delay in disclosing results and the FDA is reviewing the data amid ongoing criticism of the way the drugmakers handled the trial, because the study endpoint was briefly changed without consulting the lead investigator even as heavy advertising continued.

A recent poll by the New York Institute of Technology and Gallup & Robinson underscores PhRMA’s concerns - 34 percent of adults aged 18 to 26 agreed with the statement: “I trust pharmaceutical companies less than I used to,” and when asked to agree or disagree with the statement “Prescription-medication advertising makes people want products they don’t need,” 49 percent agreed. But when asked to agree or disagree with “Pharmaceutical manufacturers should not advertise their products to consumers,” some 40 percent disagreed.

Cynics wonder if this isn’t the same halfhearted path PhRMA traveled in August 2005, when it issued its DTC ad guidelines, a 15-point code of conduct that shied away from mandates on the most serious issues, including a one- or two-year moratorium on advertising drugs newly approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Ad Age w rites. “Self-regulation is going to be a dead end,” Robert Weissman, managing director of advocacy group Commercial Alert, tells the mag. “It has been and it will be.”

There is also a growing sentiment that the ad-agency community has some responsibility here as well. John Kamp, executive director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication, whose member organizations include the 4A’s, the American Advertising Federation and the Association of National Advertisers, says: “Sure. If agencies are worried about their own reputation and pay attention to the veracity of their own ads and their clients’ ads, yes, they should have some responsibility.”

But in this instance, Omnicom Group’s DDB Worldwide, the creative agency of record for Vytorin, did not have access to the Vytorin study at any point between its completion in 2006 and its release earlier this month, according to Schering spokesman Lee Davies. DDB referred all requests for comment to its client. “Even if DDB had the (Vytorin) study, the ability to understand that trial on the consumer side is almost nil. People at consumer agencies don’t have the required backgrounds and, frankly, there isn’t a desire to know,” one health-care-agency executive, who asked not to be identified, tells Ad Age.

Source: Advertising Age