PhRMA Guidelines: Few Requirements, No Penalties

PhRMA’s new direct-to-consumer voluntary advertising guidelines contain few requirements that will add to marketers’ ethical and legal burdens in creating drug ads and does not add much to the trade group’s July 21 statement that “encouraged” the industry to better target its audience, Adweek reports. There are no penalties for not following the guidelines and no mandatory ad-free time period between a drug’s approval by the FDA and its consumer launch.

The voluntary rules call for companies to educate patients about diseases, act responsibly in targeting and promoting their medicines and encourage them to highlight risks and preventative measures.

In the end, there are only two hard-and-fast requirements. One ends “reminder ads” in which only the brand name is mentioned and no information about diseases or risks are mentioned. The second states that companies should submit all new DTC ads to the FDA before broadcasting them - which the vast majority of drug companies already do.

A statement from Commercial Alert, a longtime PhRMA critic, said that the guidelines were “a public relations exercise that cloaks doing nothing in a stream of verbiage that sounds like doing something. They will cause no inconvenience for the drug industry and no real change of behavior.”