Are Drug Companies Doing TV Product Placement?

For a couple of years I’ve followed the issue of drug brand product placement on TV. The Indianapolis Star today published a story that confirms (and indeed very kindly cites) my previous work (here and here) on this topic.

The gist: The number of drug brands being mentioned in TV scripts is on the increase, and has doubled.

The question is, Are drug companies making deliberate efforts to get their brand names mentioned (and thus courting the wrath of the FDA for irresponsible promotion)?

The answer is yes and no.

A small number of companies have made paid efforts to get their brands mentioned. Organon is one of the few companies that has come out of the closet about its relationship with the show Scrubs, which often features the Nuvaring logo on its props and in backgrounds.

But most companies deny that they do this.

Are they telling the truth?

Umm, again, yes and no.

In the times I’ve reported on this issue in the past, I noticed that there were plenty of product placement agencies who either had drug companies as clients or were in talks with drug companies. Why would a drug company hire a placement agency if it didn’t want to engage in placement?

And I also noticed that some drug companies forthrightly denied that they made payments to get their brands on TV … but declined to deny that if a show needs props or information they send the product right over. In other words, they get their placements for free.

The rationalization here is that if the company isn’t directly paying a TV producer or network to get a mention then it isn’t actually product placement. Of course, this is not how placement works – generally, clients pay agencies and agencies get the product on the show, usually by convincing the director or producer that they will save production costs by accepting realistic props for free. And on medical shows like Scrubs and ER, sometimes the writing staff just needs to know that they’re describing drugs accurately.

Plenty of scripted shout outs are, as Lilly claims in the Star article, happenstance. Prozac and Viagra are cultural clichés, those companies don’t need to pay writers to get mentions. In fact, if you look at the top 10 drugs listed by the Star, you’ll see that most of the brands fall under the “punchline” category – Vicodin, Botox, etc.

So, does that mean that the level of deliberate placement activity by companies is small? Could be. But I keep coming back to one thing: If companies aren’t engaging in this activity, why do the numbers keep on going up and up? Surely, if the TV biz was left to itself, the numbers would be flattish from year to year.

 

Comments

[John Mack]

What about paying PR agencies to get stories written in the press? Do pharma companies admit doing that? Of course, no payments are made to reporters.

The same agencies can take the initiative and get products mentioned on TV shows, but it's hard to imagine not paying them for placement. Maybe payment comes out of a "discretionary" fund, not specifically earmarked for product placement -- you know, the ubiquitous "other" or "miscellaneous" category.

[Lew]

I'll make the same basic statement I made on Pharmalot. Look at the the top 10. I think 6 have generic equivalents; thus, the brand manufacturer would likley experience little or no benefit from paying for a placement. One other is not even on the market in the US (rohypnol). The other 2 are the cultural icons you mention.

While one of the top ten admits to paying for placement, it doesn't look as though this is a big deal. Your statement about the rising number of mentions is more than likely related to the increasing interest by script writers in bashing pharma. It's a fairly common phenomenon on most of these shows.