Toward the end of 2008, Old Schering-Plough made waves by spending $10 million of its advertising budget -- in a single chunk -- on the then nascent "digital out-of-home" TV screens: the ones you now see in the grocery checkout lines, on golf carts, and at the gas pumps, for example. Tonight, Advertising Age is running a longish piece assessing what worked, and what didn't -- one year in. A lot of the money went to Dr. Scholls' line item brands.
What intitially caught my eye was that Old Schering spent $150 million a year in TV advertising on the Claritin brand, alone. Wow. As I kept reading, I began to wonder whether any of the ad spots had "meaningful efficacy" -- to borrow from pharma parlance, thus:
. . . ."What it didn't change was top-of-mind brand awareness. But we looked at this from a pretty broad perspective, so we didn't expect it to change dramatically," he said. "The other thing that really struck us from a business standpoint was that 68% of consumers surveyed saw the screen, [but] only 38% of them interacted with the screen. So only a third of the people actually watched the ad. . . .
Huh. That's much worse that the statistics usually cited for "in-home" TV ad watching -- but then the price per ad is much lower, out of home. Again, though -- like Pharmalot before us -- we wonder whether this sort of DTC advertising works at all, for pharmaceuticals.
[See my earlier piece, on the percentage of negative social media mentions, as well.]One has to wonder whether -- after CEO Clark's remarks that Consumer Health "will need a partner" (i.e., likely be busted-up, or spun-out, in some partial or full transactional move, in the near term) -- this sort of spend can continue on Dr. Scholl's and Claritin, at the "New" Merck.
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