How Did Sanofi Get Those People On That Pill?
4 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // October 30th, 2008 // 4:04 pm
Hmm… Here you have five people spinning around on Ambien CR, the Sanofi-Aventis sleeping pill, as seen on a new web site. And if you look very closely in the right-hand corner, in hard-to-read gray lettering, Sanofi confesses this is “not actual pill size.” Who would have known? Seems that in this era of increasing pressure to comply with disclosure regs, an over-anxious lawyer must have told the marketing team to make sure there was a disclaimer. As if we couldn’t have figured it out for ourselves.
Hat tip to ePharmaRx
Wendy B
Thanks for the hat tip Ed!
PharmaLiterate
Well I worked at sanofi for a while and anyone who knows sanofi knows it probably went down a different way. My guess is that the marketing team said “Look we can’t be transparent everywhere, so how about if we are extra transparent on the big giant pill, you know … to show our good intentions but then sort of relax a little in other areas like CME and Speaker Programs.”
I mean seriously folks, if they were that serious about transparency don’t you think they would be jumping on the transparency wagon with Merck, Glaxo and Lilly and making a public commitment to disclose speaker and consulting payments.
Ed Silverman
Dear PharmaLiterate,
Who am I to argue?
Best
ed
John Mack
You might want to look beyond the home page and see how Ambien CR/Sanofi is subtly pulling the wool over visitors eyes by making these people appear to be real people who have used Ambien CR. Sometimes, transparency is not enough when it comes to marketing. See “Alice, 35, is Not a Real Ambien CR Patient” at http://tinyurl.com/6dfkta