David Shaw over at B or Not 2B talks about min's Sales Executive of the Year Awards breakfast he attended. While his post is mainly about advertising and media, he also says this of keynoter Donna Campanella, director/team leader, media for Pfizer:
- Emotionally recounting her mother's struggles with Alzheimer's, she described tearing DTC ads for Alzheimer's medications from magazines, and using these as the basis for discussions with the doctor. "There's nothing like the power of DTC advertising when it really changes people's lives."
Exactly—and that's what makes it both a powerful marketing tool for pharma and something that CME providers should keep track of. In addition to hearing those messages themselves, docs also have patients coming in using these ads as "the basis for discussions." Could these patient discussions outweigh the fair, balanced, unbiased, and evidence-based information they learned in a CME activity? I wouldn't rule it out. In fact, I'd count it as a potential barrier to implementing what they learned during an activity, along with the other barriers I wrote about in my March/April issue Medical Meetings editorial.
