Worst PR Move of the Week: AZ Turns 'Bucket of Money' Incident Into a Full-Blown Fiasco

AZ fired Mike Zubillaga, the sales manager who said that cancer doctors offices were like "big buckets of money," the Philly Inquirer reported Friday. The company has thus managed to turn a one-day piece of blog gossip into a 'scandal' now entering its fifth day in the news cycle (see Pharmalot  and Peter Rost and John Mack for blanket Zubillaga coverage).

Way to go AstraZeneca!

Had AZ simply asked Zubillaga to work from home for a couple of weeks, perhaps with a stiff warning to  be more diplomatic in his future descriptions of drug rep reality,  then there would have been no further coverage and we would all have forgotten about it.

And, as Friday and today's media and blog coverage makes abundantly clear, no one really believed that Zubillaga had done anything other than speak the blunt truth.

The most galling irony is that Zubillaga's comments were published in an company newsletter published by AZ itself.

I defended Zubillaga a little bit last week, although I did note that the whipping he was receiving on the internet was warranted. Today, I've changed my mind. This has gone too far. AZ has essentially fired a guy for being too enthusiastic about his job. I now sympathize with Zubillaga completely.

It should also be noted that AZ has borrowed the Takeda-Cephalon excuse for the incident, i.e., even though this was our guy it somehow was nothing to do with us: "AstraZeneca strongly repudiates the negative comments made in this newsletter," the company told the Inky. "This newsletter was produced outside of AstraZeneca's required approval and review processes."

Regular readers of Brandweek NRX will remember this from the Rozerem and Provigil incidents recently, in which those brands' parent companies denied anything to do with wayward marketing for their drugs.

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