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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5717
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 12:32 am: | 
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Why aren’t more Blacks (big) in Pharmaceuticals????
On Avandia, a Niche Strategy Now Under Stress
By LOUISE STORY
June 6, 2007
Correction Appended
Could a widely praised approach to drug marketing now be at risk of backfiring? That is a question confronting GlaxoSmithKline and its diabetes treatment Avandia, which is now clouded by concerns over the drug’s safety.
Della Reese, the jazz singer and actress, seemed a natural choice to star in ads for Avandia, when Glaxo signed her on in 2004. Not only does Ms. Reese have broad appeal, known most recently for her role in the television series “Touched by an Angel,” but she has Type 2 diabetes.
And while she was Avandia’s main spokeswoman, from 2004 to 2006, Ms. Reese represented an important target in Avandia’s marketing: African-American consumers.
Because Type 2 diabetes is a disease twice as likely to affect black Americans as non-Hispanic white people in this country, Avandia’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline, has long placed a marketing focus on African-Americans — much more so than any other maker of diabetes drugs, according to industry executives.
In the eight years that Avandia has been for sale, becoming a $3-billion-a-year worldwide best seller, Glaxo’s African-American focus in the United States has won the company praise in the advertising industry and from some black doctors. They credit the campaigns for putting a friendly face on a drug for a disease that too often goes untreated, particularly among minority groups.
But now that Avandia is dogged by safety questions — a Congressional hearing today will address concerns that the drug may increase the risk of heart attacks — some black advertising executives wonder if Glaxo’s advertising strategy could end up working against the company.
“Avandia has such a large African-American niche, I’d expect competitors now to step up their outreach to African-Americans,” said Howard Buford, the founder and chief executive of Prime Access, a multicultural advertising agency in New York.
Alternatives to Avandia include Byetta, which is marketed by Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly. It and others could benefit if doctors started encouraging patients to drop Avandia. So far, though, many doctors seem to be playing wait and see.
Avandia’s main competitor in this country is a drug called Actos, which had a comparable number of total prescriptions written last year, about 11.3 million, according to Verispan, a health care information company based in Yardley, Pa.
Actos is made by Takeda Pharmaceuticals of Japan, which does not conduct significant consumer advertising in the United States. A spokesman for Takeda said the company had no plans to increase its advertising to consumers in light of safety concerns about Avandia. So, the competitive issue raised by Mr. Buford could be largely theoretical.
Still, Mr. Buford said it would be incongruous if Glaxo’s black outreach did come back to haunt the company, because Glaxo had worked to overcome what he described as a deep distrust of the drug industry among many African-Americans, particularly older people. He said the skepticism traces in part to the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment from the 1930’s to 1970’s in which the federal government allowed black sharecroppers to go untreated in order to study the disease’s physical effects.
“There’s still a lot of distrust,” Mr. Buford said.
And yet, some other ad industry executives said that because Glaxo had helped raise diabetes awareness in recent years among African-Americans, the company might now have a reservoir of good will that it could draw upon.
“For them to advertise a drug to African-Americans that could help save lives and provide information, that is important,” said Jo Muse, the chairman and chief creative officer of Muse Communications, a multicultural agency in Hollywood. “Thousands of African-American men, in particular, have been affected in a positive way by direct-to-patient advertising.”
A spokeswoman for Glaxo said she could not comment on the company’s marketing strategy.
Ahead of today’s hearing by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform where Moncef Slaoui, Glaxo’s chairman of research and development, is scheduled to testify, the company has been scrambling to address safety questions about Avandia that were raised on May 21 in a New England Journal of Medicine article.
The company has posted a video on its Web site featuring an executive, Dr. Anne Phillips, addressing the health concerns. And on Tuesday, the company ran a full-page ad in more than a dozen newspapers, including The New York Times, with an open letter to patients from Dr. Ronald L. Krall, its chief medical officer.
“As leaders in diabetes, we understand that managing your Type 2 diabetes is not easy,” the letter said, in part. “We also understand the confusion and concern you may have experienced following recent press coverage about the safety of Avandia. GlaxoSmithKline stands firmly behind Avandia.”
Glaxo, which spent a total of $25.7 million on Avandia advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, has by no means ignored potential white customers.
After all, black Americans represent only about 13 percent of the population. And although they are more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, the number of non-Hispanic white Americans in this country with the disease outnumbers African-American patients, 13.1 million to 3.2 million, according to the American Diabetes Association.
Latinos have been another important group for diabetes drugs, and an audience that Glaxo has also made a target with some of its Avandia advertising. The American Diabetes Association does not have national figures on the percentage of Type 2 diabetes patients in this country who are Hispanic.
Caucasians featured in Avandia ads have included the actress Jane Seymour, who was in a 2001 television spot, just a few years after she starred in the TV series “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”
And currently, a Glaxo-sponsored Web site about health, www.stepitupdiabetes.com, features the white fitness coach Bob Harper, who is the exercise guru on the NBC reality series “The Biggest Loser.” Various Avandia advertisements depicting everyday people feature Caucasians.
But there is no disputing that Glaxo has made a special effort to reach African-Americans with its Avandia advertising, ad executives say.
“You see in the broad diabetes category an acknowledgment or nod toward the African-American community, but GlaxoSmithKline was definitely a leader and one of the first groups to really use a more targeted effort,” said Croom Lawrence, the vice president for strategy and insight at RTC Relationship Marketing, a direct marketing advertising agency in the WPP Group. “That was really the face of this brand.”
And it was a brand-building effort that at least until now had been considered generally effective, as evident in the awards for multicultural marketing in 2001 and 2002 that Glaxo won at the DTC National Conference, an annual conference about marketing drugs to consumers.
Generally among marketers, efforts to reach black audiences often include ads featuring African-Americans that run in magazines like Ebony, Essence and Jet or on the Black Entertainment Television network. But those ads do not always run in mainstream media.
With Avandia, however, ads featuring a black couple or a black grandfather with his grandson also ran in mass-market magazines like Sports Illustrated, Reader’s Digest and Ladies’ Home Journal. Direct mail and outdoor advertising have also promoted Avandia to potential black patients. And African-Americans appear as prominently, if not more so, than any other group on Avandia’s Web site.
Whenever safety questions start clouding a drug, pharmaceutical companies tend to expend most of their crisis-control effort trying to persuade current customers to keep refilling their prescriptions. Any thought of acquiring new patients tends to be deferred until the controversy is resolved.
And so, for Glaxo, maintaining Avandia customers will probably involve continuing its strategy of mainstream ads, with an African-American emphasis, outside ad executives said.
And some advertising industry executives say Glaxo may now be able to build on a reputation with Avandia for having provided important information to black consumers. “This is an audience that has not had the benefit of advertising in the past,” said Byron E. Lewis, chairman and chief executive of the Uniworld Group, an agency in New York that created the multicultural ads for Avandia from 2001 to 2004.
Pharmaceutical companies in general have been seeing a higher return on direct-to-consumer advertising for minority groups, because many of the people in those audiences might not otherwise go to a doctor about a problem, said Mr. Muse of Muse Communications.
Dr. Gerald L. DeVaughn, president of the Association of Black Cardiologists, said he was awaiting more evidence before deciding whether to advise his patients to stop taking Avandia in light of the concerns about potential cardiac risks. Patients have not been asking him about the news reports about the suspected risks, Dr. DeVaughn said.
While some ad executives said the new concerns about Avandia’s level of cardiac risk may cause Glaxo to lose customers, others said that the company could hold onto many of its black customers if Glaxo is now seen as having effectively communicated the pros and cons of Avandia over the years — and having encouraged people to seek out medical help in their decisions.
“None of this exists in a vacuum,” said Mark A. Robertson, the director of business development for UniWorld, the former Avandia agency. “Glaxo has always promoted and motivated people to see their doctors to ask what is best for them.”
Correction: June 7, 2007
The Advertising column in Business Day yesterday, about GlaxoSmithKline’s efforts to market its diabetes treatment Avandia to African-Americans, misstated the name of a television network that is typically used when marketers want to reach black audiences. It is Black Entertainment Television, or BET — not the Black Entertainment Network.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/business/media/06adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4629
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 11:02 am: |
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We're all up in there--it is the illegal pharaceutical trade--
You'll yell and say nay. The Bronfman and Kennedy Family started out in bootlegging and now are in legal alchohol.
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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5718
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 02:00 pm: |
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"The Bronfman and Kennedy Family started out in bootlegging and now are in legal alchohol."
That’s exactly my point. Blacks have been "underground" for at least as long as I’ve been alive. New Jack City was made like 20 years ago. Why aren’t we in (legal) pharmaceuticals by now? We’ve been here longer than the Kennedy’s AND Al Capone and them, shit.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 8785
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 02:33 pm: |
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The pharmaceutical companies didn't just pop up. They are a part of the "diversified portfolios" of the big monopolies that dominate corporate America. The chances of black drug lords making inroads into this elite syndicate are nil. |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5719
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 03:28 pm: |
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I'm not talking about black drug lords. For example. Why can't Oprah and The Coz hire a chemist and a CEO? Instead of making the same mistakes that we made in music and sports.
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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5720
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 03:45 pm: |
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"The pharmaceutical companies didn't just pop up. They are a part of the "diversified portfolios" of the big monopolies that dominate corporate America."
Yeah, they've been around for awhile. (Though nowhere in history have they been this big & profitable.) But the same can be said about music, sports, comedy and talk shows, all areas where Blacks have made inroads.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 8787
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 03:57 pm: |
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Well, it would take more than a chemist and a CEO to compete with the pharmaceutical subsidiaries of the big mononpolies, plus you have to be in cahoots with the FDA. Oprah and Cosby are small potatoes compared to the industry giants. Their fortunes would evaporate in the face of the laboratory reseach required to create and introduce new medicines. Black people need to come up with new ideas and products to corner the market on instead of trying to get their foot into the door of big conglomerates with closed ranks. |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5723
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, June 08, 2007 - 04:31 pm: |
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Black folks have all of those ingredients...they just need to learn how to come together and stay that way. But I agree: they should stop trying to integrate because that seems to be how their MANY products and new ideas get stolen.
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Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 4641
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, June 09, 2007 - 01:12 pm: |
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The Bronfman and Kennedy Family started out in bootlegging and now are in legal alchohol."
That’s exactly my point. Blacks have been "underground" for at least as long as I’ve been alive. New Jack City was made like 20 years ago. Why aren’t we in (legal) pharmaceuticals by now? We’ve been here longer than the Kennedy’s AND Al Capone and them, shit.
(Yeah but they never had to go to the Supreme Court to get to use the same TOILET as a white man. They came off the boat and was white. Oh, they suffered some discrimination, but once they learned the language and spruced up they was allright.
And we were here allright but most were living in the South under fuedal conditions. At the time Capone was flourishing with the full cooperation of Anglos they were burning down black wall street in Tulsa--they wouldn't take a bribe from a black person like they will now.
You cannot compare us to anybody else. |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 5739
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, June 09, 2007 - 03:52 pm: |
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...I know that. I was just venting my ass off; Blacks should be getting this money.
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