Pharmaceutical ads boost the health of magazines

Consumer magazines are getting high on pharmaceuticals this year--both prescription and over-the-counter. Through August, the category accounted for more than $161 million in magazine ad spending, a rise of nearly 40 percent over last year, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

Two years after the Food and Drug Administration approved direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs, drugs and remedies has overtaken liquor as a top-10 PIB ad category. And as the FDA gives the green light to more prescription drugs for over-the-counter use, even more drug money is expected to pour into print.

Drugs and demographics

"Drugs has been a very large category for broadcasting, but has traditionally been underdeveloped in print," explains Jim Guthrie, executive vice president of marketing development for Magazine Publishers of America.

Jim Cusack, drug category manager for Reader's Digest, says drugs traditionally has been the third largest ad category for his book, with over 125 advertising pages, or 15 percent of the total, in 1991. This year, Cusack predicts, advertising pages will "probably be significantly higher." He points out that the category has more than doubled in the last five years.

How magazines cash in on this growth depends largely on the drug itself and its intended users--in other words, demographics. Ortho Pharmaceutical in Raritan, New Jersey, broke its first ad campaign for Ortho Novum 7-7-7, a birth-control pill, in September issues of American Health, Brides, Cosmopolitan, Essence, Glamour, Health, Mademoiselle, Parenting, Parents, People, Self and Vogue. The choice of magazines, according to Ortho spokeswoman Clare Castaldo, was dictated by the "criterion that we wanted to reach women of reproductive age."

The campaign, which entails multimillion-dollar spending exclusively in magazines, is the first direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising that Ortho has ever done. The effort was launched, Castaldo says, because "research showed there were still misconceptions about taking the pill, so we did an informative ad" to reach women.

Although he declined to reveal specific ad spending figures, Charles Rouse, a spokesman for Marion Merrell Dow in Kansas City, Missouri, says that ad spending for Seldane allergy remedy, Nicoderm patches and Cardizem CD heart medicine is typically between 7 and 9 percent of each product's worldwide sales revenue. Cardizem, for example, had worldwide sales of $900 million, Rouse says. Nine percent of that was spent on advertising promotions. The company matches a magazine's demographics to the target patient profile. "We have |prescription~ drugs that are very consumer-oriented," Rouse says. Advertising "helps to stimulate a dialogue between doctor and patient."

Over-the-transom ads

While editorial content pulls health and drug advertising into women's service magazines, many unlikely books are enjoying a boost in ad pages in the category. Business Week, which carried only five pages of drug ads in 1990, ran 32 pages through August of this year. According to a Business Week sales manager, the magazine positions itself to drug advertisers as "reaching educated, affluent, health-conscious people who understand a complex message."

Anne Holton, associate publisher and ad director at Country Living, says that although "we don't have the editorial to back up" pharmaceutical advertising, the magazine still gets drug ads "over the transom"--going from zero ads two years ago to nearly 20 pages this year, Holton estimates. "We do pick up things like Seldane and allergies, since we do outdoor articles. On the other hand, we'll probably not appeal to Gyno-Lotrimin because we don't have a women's health focus. We're looking at it opportunistically," she adds. "We have so many other advertising categories that drugs aren't that big for us."

Magazines like McCall's have enjoyed years of drug and remedy advertising. Publisher Barbara Litrell says her book is up only 4 percent this year in that category, but carried 104 pages of drugs and remedies ads last year. "Health and drugs is a core category because health is important in McCall's," she says.

Earlier this year the magazine brought its health-related articles together in one section, called "Total Health." "It creates a substantial environment for health," Litrell adds. "It's not scattered throughout the magazine."

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