DIA Marketing Pharmaceuticals Wrap-up

As I mentioned in a previous post, I led a panel on Leveraging Innovative Technologies at this year's Drug Information Association's Marketing Pharmaceuticals conference.

In general, DIA only makes the slide decks available to attendees; however, presenters retain ownership of their decks, so I also post mine on SlideShare, and this year, I've done the same.

I always wonder how much value people get from a deck like this one. It wasn't designed to be a standalone read. Instead, it very much was intended to be accompanied by my commentary. The essential points I was trying to make to attendees were that:

1. Mobile is no longer fringe for people consuming health information
2. Device proliferation and interaction is real. Your content is just one node in a larger ecosystem.
3. Phone/phablets keep getting bigger (which fuels further consumption and makes supplying all of your information easier)
4. However, although the phone footprint is bigger the proliferation also means people are interacting using other interfaces, such as voice recognition and spoken responses.

The rest of the panel comprised representatives from Twitter and YouTube, talking about how they are making their platforms available and what people are doing, and then Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca discussing how they're leveraging these platforms and ensuring compliance.

I had a great time, and the audience asked a lot of good questions and was very engaged.

Aside from the panel I chaired, there were many great sessions. You can get a feel for the conference by checking out my Twitter feed. The conference hashtag was #DIAmp.

This conference is one with significant FDA participation. From my perspective, some of the highlights from FDA's presentations and panel discussions included:

1. FDA reiterated with exactly the same slide as at September's Food and Drug Law Institute's Advertising & Promotion conference the points about Reminder-like advertising. There was no change. This further affirms that this category is well-established in FDA's eyes and should not be regarded as suspect by industry. 

2. In oral statements, there was some language on the desirability of mentioning serious risks in the link from Reminder-like advertising. Specifically, the link to the PI (which is required for reminder-like ads, but not for reminder ads) should mention that there are serious risks with the product. See my live Tweet, which is of course not a transcript.

3. The seemingly perennial question of repurposing TV spots on Hulu came up again. Repeatedly, I have heard FDA panels receive this question, and every time, FDA says something along the lines of "If it's compliant on TV, then it's compliant on Hulu." (See here for example.) Yet during this conference, the response was phrased differently. The emphasis in the response was in the narrow definition of a broadcast ad in the regulations and that Hulu is allegedly outside that definition. 

4. Finally, there was lots of discussion about the brief summary guidance. FDA did clarify that they will accept using the full PI and/or PPI in lieu of developing the new consumer brief summary document. That point had been included in the previous versions of the guidance explicitly but was eliminated from the latest version; however, FDA is strongly encouraging companies to adopt the newer recommendations instead. As the FDA speaker said, "That [using the full PI] would make us sad."