Pristiq Ad Among Most Recalled On TV

Or so says Nielsen Research. The most-recalled ad was the ubiquitous Flomax ad, followed by ads for Cialis and Gardasil in a tie for second. Remarkably, Pristiq was next with its creepy wind-up doll ad. I say remarkably because there are so many ads for so many drugs, medical devices and procedures on TV that it boggles the mind and it's got to be hard for some of them to creep into the collective consciousness much less long-term memory. Not that Pristiq is selling particularly well.

For those of you who are troubled by DTC pharma ads, especially on TV, I'm with you. But we're stuck with them. They bring in so many billions of dollars in ad revenue for various media companies each year that they will go unchallenged (with a few exceptions) for decades to come. Yes, the mainstream media has become pharma 'hos.

Back in 1997, one of the first radio interviews I did was of Tom Brokaw who was visiting UC-Berkeley for some kind of smarty pants sit-down with the dean of the J-School. I took Brokaw into a hallway at school and pointedly asked him about the NBC "Nightly News," of which he was the managing editor, and its sudden embrace of health care coverage, which it hadn't focused on much in the past. But this was 1997, DTC ads had just become legal, General Electric owned NBC and sure as heck wanted those pharma ads. Any connection there, Tom?

Brokaw, who had a huge pimple on his chin that day, insisted that there was nothing to it, that it was all legitimate news and so on. Some of it was, no doubt. Twelve years later, I watch health care news stories on NBC and other networks with much interest and much consternation. Almost across the board, the major TV and cable news networks all have doctors on their airwaves plus a few stray health care reporters and so many of them are terrible and spew out distorted, deeply-biased reports on various aspects of health care that it just makes me laugh, especially when you consider that roughly 50 percent of the advertising on a program like "Nightly News" is from a pharma company.

One of my favorite examples of dubious health care reporting came from "Nightly News" earlier this year when a huge study came out and linked depression and cardiac deaths in women. The same study also linked anti-depressant use to cardiac deaths in women.

"Meanwhile, NBC's 'Nightly News' gave the depression and cardiac death link huge play on its program last evening, but Brian Williams, the show's anchor, completely failed to mention the anti-depressant link. I'm not sure who is writing Williams' copy, but either they or he are utterly blind to not mention that point. Or is the TV media too scared of being dinged for allegedly scaring people off their meds?"

Or scaring Big Pharma from buying ads?