Drug Marketing Meets Primetime TV

Online searches via Google for the drug amantadine spiked on early last week after the drug played a prominent role in the medical drama “House.”

In terms of digital health, as the Washington Post accurately points out, this is important for one key reason. Primetime TV is a powerful medium to send people to the Internet to look up drugs.

In the epidsode, House, the hero on the show, realized that a young woman named Amber had damaged kidneys and was taking amantadine for the flu. The drug built up to toxic levels.

The result of mentioning amantadine: the drug shot to the top of Google’s hot trends list last week, WSJ’s Buzzwatch reported.

So, there is a clear connection here. Primetime TV and pharmaceutical drugs.

According to Jacob Goldstein at the Washington Post, between January and September of last year, pharmaceutical products and logos were seen or mentioned 705 times on broadcast and cable television, up from 630 times during the same period in ‘06, Fortune reported last year.

Rachel at Our Bodies Our Blog also pointed out that last year, The Well-Timed Period noted posters for the NuvaRing on the set of Scrubs and wondered whether this was an example of “stealth pharma marketing.” It later became clear that this was exactly the case, with NuvaRing maker Organon Pharmaceuticals acknowledging placement deals with primetime programs including “Scrubs,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “King of Queens.”

But the FDA can’t ignore this forever. Researchers at UCLA recently called for the FDA to regulate this marketing scam.

The facts about drugs in scripts are poorly supervised and sometimes incorrectly portrayed (as are medical terms and emergency situations). But what we can see from last week’s report is that people are paying attention. And, they’re making the extra step of going onto their computers to find out more.

If the facts are incorrect, this can become a large-scale public health concern if the FDA does not jump in soon.

As far as marketing goes, the Pharma companies will probably see the TV-internet connection as a positive trend and attempt to buy their way into more Primetime TV shows.