You read that correctly. According to Peter Rost, Pfizer's country manager for Sweden, Niklas Prager, has written a column for the left-leaning Aftonbladet in which he says that direct-to-consumer drug advertising "is a bad model for Sweden" because "Pharmaceuticals are too important to be treated like any other product."
If you want to read the whole thing, first learn Swedish and the click here for the full download. (Rost, of course, is from Sweden and still speaks with a straight-from-Central-Casting Scandinavian accent.)
Two things to think about:
1. Prager obviously isn't interested in making himself popular with CEO Jeff Kindler, whose U.S. unit is the second highest DTC spender of all drug companies (I think) and brings in roughly half of Pfizer's entire global revenues.
2. Only the U.S. and New Zealand allow consumer advertising for drugs. Why are foreigners so aghast at American DTC? Travel outside the country and you'll see non-Americans roll their eyes and laugh scornfully at all the ads for cancer medicine and bladder-control products on American TV screens, as if those items could be picked up at the supermarket. I once sat next to a drug marketing exec on a plane from New York to London and he told me that American drug advertising was regarded as so excessive in the UK that it had actually nixed the chances of UK drug companies being allowed to conduct similar promotions.
In other words: While Prager's position sounds heretical to us, he's actually the normal one in this equation. It's us in the U.S. that are out of step with the rest of the planet on this issue.



