Reuters Events | Pharma

Thought leadership and innovation for the Pharmaceutical Industry

In many European countries, the advertising of prescription drugs is severely regulated, often to the point where the brand name of a medicine cannot be mentioned in any campaign, including in adverti

In many European countries, the advertising of prescription drugs is severely regulated, often to the point where the brand name of a medicine cannot be mentioned in any campaign, including in advertising on the Internet. But are there unexploited opportunities for brand communication by the pharma industry via the Web?

Web 2.0 offers many tools that benefit both companies and consumersamong these is the blog. Blogs have proven extremely useful for product support, sales, PR and branding, and more and more pharma companies are employing blogs as part of their marketing efforts.

Two years ago, I suggested to one of my more innovative pharma clients that they develop a blog to communicate online the benefits of their medicine. At first, the client was very resistant to the idea. Their brand would be strengthened, they said, through sponsored content on appropriate sites. At that time, the companys annual budget for online media was around 30,000.

Later, the clients online media budget underwent a drastic reductiondrastic enough to require new and more cost-effective solutions.

Of the options available, the blog seemed to be the best tool, and after some weeks working with a provider, we were able to launch a blog. To avoid direct contact (and therefore conflict of interest) with the company, the blogger was employed by one of the funds of the pharmaceutical company.

The blogger, writing under a pseudonym, described a hypothetical sickness in a way that engaged readers and generated interest and a Web presence. In order to have sufficient content to launch the blog and update content frequently, we had several posts available that had been written in advance. This gave us a years worth of ready content, and in the first several weeks the blogger was required to generate only one or two new posts.

Initially, traffic was driven to the website via link-partners (an arrangement of if you put my link on your blog, Ill put your link on mine), but over the course of several weeks, the blog began performing well on search engines and key word searches, increasing visitor hits even further. In just two months, the blog was regularly receiving 200-300 unique hits a day.

In the beginning, the client was understandably reluctant to mention the brand name directly in the blog. However, blog readers clearly asked about the medicine in the comments, and so the blogger was able to publicly state the name of the therapy in response.

Social online media is not moderated content. These are platforms in which anyone can talk or write about anything. If companies use this tool responsibly, then their relationships with their target groups can be strengthened. However, companies must be careful to stay within legal boundaries, and for this reason, in the case of this client, the brand manager, the PR manager and the company lawyer were kept informed about every step we took.