Pharma

Google pitches pharma on YouTube merits for DtC advertising

The pharmaceutical industry is warming up to direct to consumer advertising on YouTube, but Google, which acquired the media channel in 2006, would like drug companies to get a lot warmer.

The pharmaceutical industry is warming up to direct-to-consumer advertising on YouTube, but Google, which acquired the media channel in 2006, would like drug companies to get a lot warmer. At the Eye for Pharma conference this week, David Blair, the head of industry for health at Google, peppered listeners with some fun, startling  facts about YouTube’s audience and why they should make it a higher priority in their marketing plan.

Pharma scaled way back on direct-to-consumer ad spend on the Internet last year, according to a report by Medical Marketing and Media. Of the $3.8 billion the sector spent on DtC ads, Internet advertising went down more than 14 percent over 2012 to $60 million — second only to newspaper’s decline of 28 percent. TV DtC ad spend soared 12.7 percent to more than $2.48 billion.

Blair heads up a digital marketing team that works with clients on marketing solutions across Google’s search, display, YouTube, mobile and social platforms. He made a pretty convincing case why pharma should focus less on TV and more on the Web.

Last fall marked the first time more people spent more time online than they did watching TV, according to Blair.  TV viewership is becoming more fragmented. Half of TV viewership is on networks that have less than 1 percent marketshare.

Then there’s YouTube, where 100 hours of content are uploaded per minute, according to Blair. One in three viewers share a YouTube video. On Twitter, 700 YouTube videos are shared each minute. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, Blair said.

The “Real beauty” viral YouTube video from Unilever’s brand Dove embedded above was part of Blair’s pitch. The video makes no mention of either name but the emotional response it triggers on the subject of self image has prompted people to view it 62.7 million times, mostly because it was widely shared.

But YouTube, like a lot of digital ad spend, poses questions for marketers. They need to figure out how to make themselves discoverable, prompt viewers to take action — such as talking about it and sharing a link on Twitter or Facebook, and assess its economic value.

Much more than that, though, pharmaceutical companies need to figure out how to make it part of an integrated digital marketing program, an area where many pharma companies are still experimenting. One of the things people used to criticize about Internet users — that their attention was short and divided — is increasingly a vulnerability for TV watchers too. The dreaded multitaskers are probably using their smartphone, tablets or laptops throughout.

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