In what must qualify as the strangest study ever done in DTC, two Harvard professors decided to test the usefulness of DTC by tracking Canadian consumers.  They thought the U.S. market was no longer pure since no control group exists who never saw DTC. They got around this by using French Canadians as a control group since most watch French language television and compared that to English speaking Canadians who saw some American DTC media spill into Canada and Canadian non-branded category ads.

What? I do not get it. Canada’s drugs are on government formulary with entirely different prescribing parameters and cost. There is no relationship to how U.S. consumers and their physicians make drug choices. The Harvard researchers decided that the data said DTC does not work based on three drugs.  The drugs were Enbrel(arthritis), Nasonex(allergies) and Zelnorm(irritable bowel syndrome). The researchers saw no difference in prescribing from the U.S spill and the French Canadian control group. They made the conclusion that DTC may not work.  

Now, can they tell me how much media spill these test groups saw? How many GRP’s? Pre- and post awareness levels of the ads? No, they just tracked retail prescription data and assume English speaking Canadians are, as they say in their press release of the study, “swamped” by U.S. ads.  Swamped is not good enough for research. The study’s press release is way over the top in self-congratulations on finding the “true” way to determine if DTC works. We need to know what the English Canadians actually saw and took away from the spillover ads. We need to know whether English Canadians would ever bring up what they saw in U.S. ads with their Canadian doctors who are totally anti-DTC. We need to know a lot of things not done or measured here.

 I decided to comment on this questionable study because much of the trade and business media picked it up and ran it as a big story. Some senior drug company managers may see “Harvard” and DTC “not effective” and question their DTC groups as to why they are still doing DTC.

The answer, Mr. Executive is that there are many good U.S. studies that show it works well, including other Harvard studies done in the good old U.S.A. Somehow; I think these Harvard professors who used Canada as their laboratory are naïve and misguided. This study is low in value in my opinion. They have produced nothing here that adds to the body of good ROI research. Every major research house in the U.S. has studies that put ROI on average at about 2 to 1. They use rigorous research methods and do account for GRP’s, other non-consumer promotions, competitive activity, formulary differences and other factors. They are good studies.  It is true that the U.S. studies show that about 20% of DTC brands produce negative returns, but the implication of the Canadian study is that it is zero for most brands.

The Kaiser Family Foundation did a study with Harvard that said DTC ROI was over 4 to 1. That was a little high in my estimate. So if we average the two Harvard studies, one zero the other four dollars we get: voila $2. Only joking but I put my money on the hundreds of ROI analyses that say DTC works across all media types. If we are going to give publicity to a study that says ROI is bad, then let it be one done by someone who has experience in DTC research.

Beware, my DTC colleagues of research that is flashy but faulty.  By all means read this flawed study and add it to your assessment of DTC ROI.  I am sure the study authors can explain it better than I can.

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